wipside

[wipside]

burn notice

ruminations in the workplace (WIP)

“Harry, you manipulative bitch.”

()

You try not to cry much when you jerk off. On worse days its too hard to get up and scrape jizz off your belly before passing out, and washing your face is out of the question. Leaving the tear tracks irritates your pock marks, but you’re a sex-crier at your core and it gets worse when you’re low. You think the two substances share a chamber inside you — balls full of saline or something equally stupid — cause once the flood gates open on one, the other isn’t far behind. You got empirical evidence for this theory whenever you went on the meds. Both fluid reserves dried up within a week. You felt less miserable because you felt less, and none of them worked for you anyway so you stopped taking them. This is your treatment now. This is the release valve. Other things supplementing, sure -- running, swimming, weight lifting, riding, the brief high of case solving, speed too, but sex is the big one. Some sex. Mostly crywanking. If you can’t be horny you don’t want to live.

A muffled voice starts up a monologue: Mamé downstairs with the wireless, just home from her Sunday job. Ambrosius Saint Miro seeps through two sets of floorboards and into your tired head. She has to keep it loud to hear it. Her chain-smoking saturates the house with atmospheric distance—invades the attic, even when you close the hatch, even when you open the windows, even when you stuff the cracks with ancient t-shirts: a milk-blue tinge to the far wall.

You’re quiet up here. Theres no need for it, but the habit has been hard to break. 

()

Door sticks in the frame in winter. Small patch of chipped paint letting the pulp wetten and freeze. You’ve thought of fixing it, but not bad enough yet. Door still opens. Give it another year. 

You dont take the bus. Du Bois may have fucked you out of a ride for the foreseeable future, but its only an hour on foot. 

()

Du Bois is already drinking again. You are so fucking smart. You could see this coming a mile off. His bloodshot eyes are as familiar a comfort as the scratchy woolen waistband of your winter uniform. 

You take a walk by homicides.

()

He gets it now. You’re sure he gets it. You’re two peas in a rotten little pod, the Shitkid Support Squad — or, ex in your case. Hah! You wish! The fucker came back to work floating along in Kitsuragis scent trail and you're still on cleanup duty, but you’re keeping it professional now. You go home to your own goddamn house every night, and if he ever asks to come by in off hours, it's going to be a hard no from you. 

()

The fight before the fight before the argument before the fight before the fight before the last argument happened in the squad car. He was clearly drunker than usual but still insisted on driving. You hadn’t slept for 36 hours. He didn’t hit any puppies or babies or little old ladies but he wouldn’t stop fucking with the radio despite a long standing agreement. You turned it off, he turned it on. You turned it off again, he turned it back on. You turned it down, he turned it up till some miserable fairies wailing contralto stabbed at your ear drums. You lost your cool for a second, shot normal words at him louder than you might otherwise, so he turned it up more and started singing.

You shouted more things after that, angry things, but he sang over them. It was an argument to you, but he just sang.

()

Early days as partners: You’re running target drills. 

“Good job out there, son.”

“Don’t call me that.” 

Hands up “Ok, ok.”

Later days: Du Bois and you go out for a beer — unusual for him to shell out for such ineffective medicine, but you aren’t as desensitised yet. 

()

Its not fair. You had a whole thing planned out, a big speech about how he’d fucked you over for the last time—or, no, first you had a whole speech about how this was the most embarrassing version of the ever-present embarrassment he called professional conduct, how, no, this was really it, if he pulled some shit like this *one more goddamned time* you were calling it quits, but that had hinged on him feeling guilty, or giving a shit that you exist, or knowing who you are at all, and he hadn’t, so; you’d hand a whole thing planned out, a *big speech*, a final run-down of long-term grievances. It had included all the very good reasons you were choosing to leave, and why he wouldn’t find anything better and it had a little caveat at the end, a clever twist of the knife, that if he could get his shit together for good—10 months at least—maybe, *maybe*, you would *consider* taking him back on the force. 

Living this limbo where you’ve been abandoned by someone you see every day. 

()

She’s riding your face again. You’re holding the bedrails. You’re pretending she’s tied you to the bedrails. You’re pretending you don’t want her riding your face. You’re pretending she’s locked you in a cell, has starved and beaten you, fucked you mercilessly, let other people fuck you mercilessly, and that it has been this way for so long you can’t remember what else you were good for. You’re pretending to be married— to her maybe— and you’re pretending that sharing this small space is something you could enjoy. You’re pretending her son is your son. You’re pretending to want a son. You’re pretending she has no son. You’re pretending she’s not married. 

You’re pretending a man is watching you, from the corner of the room. You’re pretending her husband is watching. You’re pretending he’s jerking off.

You don’t stay long after. You always get too ashamed. 

()

“Not to be a fag, but […] you’re […]. Tell me […]?”

Something something. Something that happened. Something thats gone now. Something you’re trying to forget. 

()

He’d been a good partner for the physical things. He’s the one that got you lifting. You were leaner before, more of a runner. He’d deadlifted a hundred Ks, showoff masculinity — he’d grinned at you, red-faced, and you’d wanted to prove you were better.

Weights heavy enough to snap your bones, but your bones hold anyway. Barely. You feel them creaking. Your body is falling apart, but slowly. You dont have to deal with it right now.

“9…10…11…12” hands hover under the bar as you force it up onto the rack. 

()

He came to work hungover and you thought first time?

You were disappointed by him, looked down your nose at him all day, and you were comforted. Here is proof that there isn’t anything else wrong with you. DuBois is a corrupting influence on even the sanest, most straight-laced of men. You can picture them last night doing something stupid: Blackout drunk, high on something, public indecency or the thumping walls of an apartment you have yet to see. Either way disturbing the peace. You think about it on and off all day, pity and revulsion at the imagined sight of one on the other, shifting and switching which silhouette is where whenever the image recurs: Kitsuragi with his hand down DuBois' pants, DuBois bending Kitsuragi over his flimsy kitchen table, Kitsuragis belt around his ankles, choking DuBois on his cock. 

()

Early days still: You throwing up in an alley after too much drinking, him murmuring “You’re alright. You’re ok.” Stroking your back like a babe.

(Again: you resented all of this. What felt good in the moment angered you after, the mockery of tenderness made clear from a distance, images of him on the scuffed attic floorboards sucking the self-respect from your body like a leech. This was why it couldn’t sustain itself. You’d tried to keep things on the rails but he couldn’t be fucking normal about it.)

()

The picture on his badge. He’s your age. He looks healthier and happier than you ever have. You’d needled him about it when it was re-issued and he didn’t change the shot. 

When drunk again: “It’s the last time the world made sense. I dont want this—“ hand jerks at his face “—thing to replace it.”

Then what hope is there for me?

()

You cling to his back until he wants to do the things you want him to do. Then you don’t want them anymore, so you get off. 

 You linger in the distance. You tell him, to his face, “I dont believe you can do these things.” And he says “fuck you, of course I can do these things” and he tries to do them on his own and he fails—first time and every time after— fails, consistently, to do these things you sometimes want him to do, comes back from it worse than before, more limbs missing than ever, and you feel vindicated and full of contempt. 

You tell him “I never believed in you.”

You’re disappointed. 

And you crawl up onto his back again. 

()

He’d told you, once, when he was drunk. You wish he hadn’t. He didn’t seem to remember the next day. He’d tried to lean his head on you and that frisson of horror contact sometimes provoked made you walk home in the dark. 

()

In the third to last fight, he’d called you a parasite. You hadn’t disagreed. You know what you are. You’re weak and stupid and nobody in the entire history of the world has ever loved you. 

Still manage to be better than most people, somehow. The worlds a terrible place, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just that you work cleaning up scum.

You’re better than him, anyway. You’re a tape worm, but *hes* a goddamn— a god damned prion disease! Ha! Apparently thats what gets you promoted. Weaponised brain damage.

()

Before that last, bad fight, he’d come home with you. His apartment was being fumigated again. The tenants in the unit below his had complained of roaches six times this season, and it had eventually become apparent that the problem was coming from the floors above. The landlord sent someone, probably because they vaguely remembered a building inspector on one of the leases. 

Mamé in bed already, used up bag of bones. Her hearing aids are busted and you can’t afford to fix them. Roast potatoes and onions in a dish on the counter. Towel over it. She’s left a note. Just heating instructions, not something you need.

“Bullshit assignment in the middle of nowhere.”

“You’re the one who took it.”

“Yeah, well, cant have those fuckers in the 57th thinking we’re soft. You got anything to drink around here?”

Of course you had. He was already drunk all the time now, so what difference did it make?

“Dead people all over the place. I see them on the back of my eyelids, Vic. I see dead guys in my fucking dreams.”

You drinking too, in a joking mood. “You like it.”

”I dont like it-“

”You *like* it, you like murder cases-”

”I don’t.”

”-you sick shit. You-“

��Shut up”

“-*like* doing autopsies. You’d-”

”I dont fucking like it”

”-fuck a corpse if your dick could get hard enough to-”

“I don’t FUCKING LIKE IT! I dont! I dont *like* fucking- stop laughing, this isn’t funny, I dont like looking at rotten bodies every day of the week, I dont! Its the worst part of this godforsaken job.” 

“‘Ooh, noo, I dont liiiiike it,” he starts towards you. You back away. “I dont liiiiike handling dead guys mouldy penises, I doooon’t, stooop’” he lunges at you half-heartedly, but you’re up on the sofa now, nimble where he’s sluggish. “‘waaa, you’re *forcing* me to go elbow-deep in this guys body cavity without any gloves on.’”

“You fucker!” He swipes at you again and you evade. “You are so fucked, you know that?”

“*I’m* fucked? *youre* the fucked one, corpse fucker!”

“Fuck you!”

“Youre fucked!”

“No, *youre* fucked!”

“You are!”

“No, You!”

“You!”

“You!”

“YOU!”

“ENOUGH!” “Fuck me running, what is wrong with you today?”

“‘Whats up with you, man?’ I’m not the one who dropped his sense of humour on the way here.”

“This!” Waving between the two of you “This! This! This *thing*! This faggy halfway house for the terminally lonely! I don’t want it anymore! I want—”

“What? You want what? What do you want? What do you-”

“I want—”

“-want harry? What could the great detective *possibly* feel is missing from his life? What’s the thing you think will fill the hole this time, hm? What’s big enough to fill the fucking *hole* of you?”

“The hole of me— the hole of *me*?! Hahaha, the hole of *you*! *You’re* the bottomless pit of— *youre* the one who—I’m not the empty one here, Ok?! I got depth coming out my *ears*, Viquemare!! I got multitudes spraying out my ass!! You would *drown* in the vastness I got going on inside me! Fucking homo— *FUCK!*” he throws his glass off to the left. You dont startle. “I dont *need* filling, what I *need* is—“

“you need, you need, all you do is *need* things! What?! What is it now?! A drink?! A day off?! A new car?! A fat set of tits to bury your ugly fucking head in!?”

“I NEED YOU TO—” the shout trails out, loses the fury, isn’t sure where he was going. “I need—” Quietly, almost tearful, he beseeches the walls. “I need. Something. Anything. Please. a friend, a fuck, a- a fucking cat, *something*, I need—“

“Your mommy?”

The bottle flew past your ear and clattered against the wall. Didn’t hit, didn’t even shatter. Embarrassing. Pathetic. You told him so. He’d doubled down, thrown another. That one hit. He’d aimed at your head again, but overcorrected, slugged it straight into your solar plexus. It knocked the words right out of you. He’d deflated then, come over all gentle, gearing up to apologise. You’d punched him in the upper quadrant to watch how he wheezed around his fossilised liver. He’d hunched, gasping, slurring slurs, grabbed blindly at the tables surface, thrown the dirty plate at your head, missed again. Onions and potatoes flying through the air. You’d laughed at him, cold starch squishing into the carpet as you dodged a pillow, asked if he’d been such a deadshot when teaching kiddies to play dodgeball, or if it was easier now he wasn’t spending most of his time peeking up their gym shorts. He’d roared, lept at you, sent you both flying. 

For a moment, at least, his body wanted to kill yours. You’re not sure how much mind was left. He’d gone to put his hands around your throat, but you took the high ground, got a few good hits in on his face before he leaned up and head-butted you. Your nose gushed. His dribbled. You both failed to take advantage.

There was a struggle, which became wrestling, which became a reverse choke-hold, which became an embrace with too much crotch. Pants came down to your knees, his ankles. Texture of dirty carpet on bare skin, potato mush on his lower back when you turned him over.

You’d told him to stay, gone to the bathroom briefly: condoms that time, out of lube, spit straight on dick—didn’t want to feel around in his unclean asshole, didn’t want shit in your urethra. Didn’t want to think about what you were doing, really, so you held him down, nose-blood spattering his shirttails. He’d whined at the breech so you’d waited a minute, stroked his flank. Not so much for him as for your own pain: you couldn’t stand the stillness. It was terrible, this, having peace to think. 

When his breath stopped shuddering, you’d asked him. He’d nodded blearily, reached back to caress your thigh. Cheek pressed into carpet, his eyes were off in the distance somewhere. You’d pressed your mouth to his shoulder and moved.

So yeah, to make a long goddamn story short, you’d fucked him. You’d fucked him the way you had been for a while, and he’d sort of passed out halfway, the way he did sometimes, but you’d pulled his hair to wake him up and he’d come on your living room rug in a thin, geriatric dribble. 

That was the normal fight that preceded the bad one.

()

TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD

FOR NEW PEOPLE. IT IS TOO LATE FOR US.

()

Whatever else you could say about his work performance, *not showing up* wasn’t usually a problem. Showing up shitfaced? Showing up with a broken nose and more teeth missing? Showing up several hours late and screaming at anyone who spoke louder than a whisper? All of those, yes, but he’d show up eventually, in some state. 

(“If I didn’t work here I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, Vic. I’d just drink and drink and drink and party and party and party. I think six months leave would kill me dead.” You’d laughed. It was a joke. It wasn’t. Not really. You laughed anyway.)

You think to go to his apartment but you don’t know where he lives now. 

()

“Whatever personal grievances you mistakenly believe we share, this is a job. We are at work. I am doing this in my capacity as an RCM officer, not the other member of a two man knitting circle.”

“Fuck, fuck! Slow down!” The car swings around a hard bend without slowing. You hear a lamppost hiss past the cracked window at an uncomfortably close proximity. “How did you get a work car?! You drive like an asshole!”

Kitsuragi doesn’t reply, but you feel the engine quieten. Your stiffened fingers relax around the ceiling rail as the car slows. 

And keeps slowing.

… And keeps slowing, until it stops. 

Reaches over, opens the passenger side door.

“Its a half hour walk from here. By the time you arrive you will display the expected level of professionalism.”

Gets out, stunned

Drives off

It takes you forty minutes to get there. You’re stewing the whole way. You could have made it in 20, jogging along with murder in your brows, but a section of pavement has caved in on Main Street and you need to take a different route. It throws you off, has you walking the last stretch. The dense knit of your forehead unfolds.

You’d rather he was dead. You’d resigned yourself to another heart attack or a self-inflicted headshot, the way you resigned yourself to the general shitting out of everything around you. This is so much harder to control.

()

What is there to say? “you need me”? “Get back here”? “Don’t leave me alone”?

Pathetic. Disgusting. Go home and make your dick cry, corpse fucker.

()

You can tell when they’ve worked something out. DuBois stops coming to work hungover, but he stops working as hard too. He seems contented. You don’t ask. You *do* get on his case when, for the third week running, he never stays a second past shift, leaving you to finish your shared paperwork alone. 

“Leave it for tomorrow.” He tells you. His bemused tone is infuriating. “It’ll still be here tomorrow. What difference does it make?”

You don’t see Kitsuragi. 

()

Early days again: You identify his body within a week of your 32nd. Even bloated and wet the hollowness echoes its recognition. 

“I’m sorry about your dad.” “It’s shit, losing parents.”

You shrug. You really don’t care. It worries you, some days, how little these things make you feel. What can you say? That you're fine? That it doesnt matter? The worthless old fuck didn’t even have the decency to kill himself. He’s one of the 14 drunks each year who fall in the harbor trying to take a piss.

(“He was such a lonely little boy” mamé said. “Always crying about something. I did what I could, but you can’t live for them.”)

“My dad was like that. Sensitive. Beat him at cards once as a kid and he sulked for weeks.” He laughs. “Funny man. Wouldn’t play with me after that.”

You fiddle with the cardboard beer mat, peel layers of pressed fibre apart and hope he’ll stop talking. You dont want to know any of this. You dont need someone else’s shit haunting your head. 

You didn’t want to be in the attic so you made him take you home. You’d wanted to ask him if he’d fuck you, but he was soft-cocked. Whiskey-soft. Holding you on the twin size mattress, he’d tugged your trousers off and administered an arrhythmic handjob, let you wail into his shoulder. The wet mockery of your face on his shirt when you rolled away was enough to make you sick again. 

More drinking. Furry face abrading your stomach, tongue bathes the shame off you. You offered to suck his cock, even out the imbalance. He’d let you try but still couldn’t get it up. You’d stayed down there long enough to pass the humiliation from your body to his, make it about his failing flesh, not yours. Thirty minutes his fingers carded clumsy through your hair, thumb stroking your cheek with that usual mockery, feeling out the limp mouthful, dispersing the intermittent leakage as he murmured below his breath: “Good boy, Jean. Good boy. Daddy’s got you.”

Afterwards, when more drinking, naked, separate, more drinking, when another hand job, when no shirt to feel sick over so fingers in your ass, fucking you, when his dick still disinterested even as you come again gasping his latests title and immediately wish you could want to kill yourself, afterwards, more drinking, when clothes on, when out in the living room, drinking again, more drinking, when nothing happens here except that it does, more drinking, drinking again, when you, asking for something solid inside, but he still doesn’t want you, when he does you the favour of bending you over the couch back anyway, groping at your front, soft front groping your hard back, when slurring in your ear about the warmth of his regard for you or how good you are, the nasty, inbred things he wants to give you when he’s not so brined, when nothing happening is over and you help each other back onto the couch, when teeth and spit for a moment, when lips and tongues, when he tells you to stay put, sweet boy, when brings you a half-full glass of water you spill, when brings you another half-full glass of water and makes you drink it, when settles beside you with something better to drink, drinking again, more and more drinking, afterwards, after all this has already happened, he starts running his mouth again.

“Not to be a fag, but… if things’w’re different…. ‘f I wasn’t…. but, ’s too scary. I can’t… whnm sober, I-- I get scared.” 

You dont say anything.

“S’not cause I don’t want to, I do, I just… I dunno. Scared.” He rolls his neck to bleer at you. “I think y’re my best friend. ‘m I your best friend?”

Eyes rolled and unfocused, you say: “Y’re my *best friend*, Harry.” 

You hadn’t wanted to, but you’d meant it.

“Tell me you love me?”

You wrestled your hand out of his. “Don’t be a fucking fairy.”

“No, c’mon, just once. Jus’this once.”

He’d tried to lean his head on you but the gin-bile stench of him, that frisson of horror contact sometimes provoked, made you walk home in the dark alone.

You wish he hadn’t. Uneven steps had the fourth dried load tugging at your pubes.

He was drunk. You were drunk. He didn’t seem to remember the next day. 

He’d told you, once. He’d as good as told you. He’d wanted to tell you.

()

by the time you get there whatever was supposed to happen has already been and gone. Kitsuragi walks out the front door as you're turning the last corner. Sees you. Nods. He asks you if you want to ride back with him in a tone of soft command. You blink and are back at the station. Nothing to do here, not after last week, so you go home. You jerk off. Saline oozes out of you without the expected relief. The tit rags from your top drawer don’t feel real anymore. The bodies in them look weird, too smooth, too stiff, too far away. You can’t cum. You feel sick. You give up, go to the bathroom, try to piss with a hard-on, avoid getting pissed when you end up pissing everywhere. Throw a towel on the floor round the toilet and avoid thinking of the mounting laundry. Avoid thinking about your body betraying you again. 

()

He had been the one thing you could count on, not a companion but a part of your scenery, the looming shape of him so uncompromising in its threat that you never thought to worry it wouldn’t take you with it when it blew. The implosion, the dip in the earth, how it has done you the injustice of leaving quietly, that is the insult. No buried remains. Only the pit. Only the parting in the pale where you know not to follow. You are on the edge, watching these elements of you be swallowed: One fourth of a widowing. Something close to a friendship. Certain moments of no importance that are yours alone now. The inside jokes, which aren’t as funny when you recite them to yourself. Were they ever? Were they ever good jokes to start off with? You doubt it. And the memories, were the memories any better? Hardly. And the love? Was that real? Not with you involved. Is it such a great loss, then, this erasure of your backup? 

Yes. To you, yes. To you it is a great loss, even if you’ll never own it.