I don’t want to be told yes. I don’t want to be told no. At the Moonlight Hotel in the Petaling District, the concierge looks me up and down and then directs me, with the solemnity of an archangel delivering the burden of the inevitable, to the bar across the street. Looking down as I dart across the tar, my mind is briefly netted by the streaks of dark red light that swim in the gutter puddles. Drifting, garnet tadpoles. The metabolism of the red and tender, that is, the glimmer of the other than affirms contrast, scarlet to my baby blue, that promises togetherness despite difference. To be so entranced is to know I still have some vital force left to me. Right? I still have some life left, however meagre? The staggered lines of cars watch me, a bowed and penitent shadow against the headlights.
I’m deep inside the grotto of the bar—far, far too late to back out—when I finally notice him, the man I never dated. It’s the iris of my id that recognizes him first: the straightness of his back, perfect posture to the last. Then I feel, like the yank of a rope around my waist, the pull from the cratered gold moon inside his torso. His gravity catches my breath like a fish on a hook. I wriggle pointlessly, a spotted mackerel with a split of red on my gilled neck, a sprig of parsley and lemon wedge against my solar plexus. Then, to my horror, I register another feeling: the relief of a return from exile. Hunted through a crevasse by a masked killer but thrilled to be caught, delighted to have my heart extruded by Azrael himself. Oh no. No, no, no.
Wait, yes. Now that I’ve recognized him, now that there is no going back, I am no longer capable of treading carefully. I stare like a freak. I take him in like a long drink of saltwater. The feeling trickles in, brines my organs. Jar burial, early formaldehyde. Later, I will retch like I am dying on the floor of the ruined temple. I can tell from how his fingers move that the frosted glass between his hands is lightly wet. Gentle, transparent petals of touch left behind. He doesn’t have a buzzcut anymore. The hair curls at the nape of his neck. Pinkish tan line just under his collar. Vines on the wrought-iron balustrade. Imagining myself in Romeo’s green tights, that I were a glove on that neck, that I could announce my desire in dramatic pentameter. Outrageous. At this slanted angle, his eyes are to me seeds of wheat, cast over the watery delta. Sleepy eyes, but secretly alert, cat-like, as yellow as I remember, trained on the amber grain of the table. He hasn’t noticed me. A disappointment, sure, but also a major mercy. I don’t know what I would do if he was looking at me. I used his name as my email password for ten years and had a panic attack every time I entered it in.
Everything about me is wound so tight, so suddenly. Coiled, forced, rewired by a map of undercover copper that has chosen this moment to activate, to hobble and kidnap the dreams of my life, my presence of mind. But then again, did I ever have dreams, before this? Did I ever have a mind? I am clenching my fists, the muscles in my thighs, the teeth in my mouth. Iron on my gumline. Stick me hard and I’ll drain out, obediently. A pewter tub of pus, marrow and love. Frantic, supercharged. Every cell ripening to burst. Every bone, a gold-handled steak knife, pointed in one direction. No, a crowd of tuning forks, all vibrating in one low voice. Threaten to play my chords in your order and I’ll cry out, no hesitation. Ouch. The cardinal I have raised from infancy is pecking at my breast, flighty even in the feeding, and, unsatisfied, he takes bloodied wing. I am mortified to think of the expression on my face and the injuries it communicates. Both those I feel and those I could rise to inflict.
I meet the bartender’s eyes. He smiles knowingly, with such infinite pity that I could kill him. I have to choke down the urge to go up and admit everything to him, my plainclothes confessor. Everything that was dead is alive, and I am seeing symbols everywhere, I’d say. You only just got here, idiot, he’d reply. What is with your generation’s obsession with symbols? Blue heart, red shirt. Chapped lips, drilled lock. Silver cross and my shattered faith not only reformed but taken to an unnatural extreme. Makes me want to drive along the rocky coast for forty hours, at careless speed. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. I don’t even know where the brake pedal is. But isn’t that obvious? Just you wait until I break apart and all my diamonds are cast on the waters. Maybe I am a masochist after all. My hand was once his hand underneath the sheets. You have no idea what I imagined by the crush of blue and scarlet moonlight. The pure excess of fantasy that began as smoke but that solidified, perversely, finally taking real, wriggling, pained shape. Lost media, in the broken vein of scrolls dug out of the black, salty sediment of a coastal cave. I park at the shoulder and begin to dig. I believe, not that it happened, but that it will. That it lies waiting. A vividness of amphibian life—half-passion, half-punishment—that I cannot locate in the fossil record, no matter how I dig through sable sands, so I defer instead, trowel falling from my hands as I get to my knees, to the ultimate paleness of the sky. Do the clouds accept my prayer, do they reclothe into omens? You have no idea how stupid I could be just to belong to someone who doesn’t want me, and never did.
It’s happening now, in real-time. My heart is pulp, is polymer in a press. I am watching him stand to leave. Palm on the grimy surface. Wrist flexing as he turns. He is going to face me. He is going to see that I am there, that I am older and less pretty. One rotation of the violet planet. The jaundiced satellite, trembling in orbit. My vision goes dark. They say passion is red but really, it’s the darkest black imaginable, once you’ve fallen into its hole. The ritual starts. Justify that trance. The puddled candles, the discarded pilgrim’s shawl, the succubus summoned for romantic counsel. You serious, girl? Do you not see you will be punished for this willingness to believe? But I am already rationalizing the way I anchored myself to the flood of ichor, to the bridge over the abyss. Obsessing over fragments in the dust. Puzzle of bones, maze of desire. Chanting poorly from haunted gospel. Seek his permission, you, the independent woman. Betray your code, you, the rational actor. Offer your flesh like a tray of deli meat. A grade-A calf, fuzzy ears clipped. The succubus, sitting on the bar, sharpening her horns with a nail file, looks at me with contempt. Nothing in the world could stop me now. Scratch out the compass rose over your heart. Bloody, festering mark. Repress and then explode. Don’t say yes, and don’t say no.
Don’t you know it’s a privilege to be loved by me? So why don’t you act like it? God damn it, why don’t you act like it?
Checking out of the Moonlight Hotel in the hour before dawn, the concierge gives me a long look. I’ve realized too late that he can read my ego like a neon marquee. From the tall windows, I see the wide-eyed cars, the garnet tadpoles, the school of mackerel pass by. They are at a loss for words and so scream into the light instead.