Tangerines and Agent Orange
Hamburg II
To A.V. For all the love And for being the voice in my head telling me that everything's going to be okay
“I’m sick you know. I have the worst cold.” The words flowed from her mouth in a whisper — she knew he wouldn’t care. “You wanna do me a solid? Find me a better immune system.” She readied herself for laughter but before she knew it his lips were on hers again, the tip of his tongue massaging the length of hers, shaving away at the film of raw onion and the whole milk which she had thrown on her cereal that morning. Pale white burying hot red. Her lower lip got caught between his teeth and her own, tearing open and causing blood to pool in the crevice where their lips met. He pulled his head back, bit his lip and scraped the blood off it, streaking it on his white teeth, showing them off the way he did whenever he would get a nosebleed as a kid; she sucked on her wound in response. The copper taste filled her mouth and reminded her of childhood, the scraped knees and ripped corduroy pants flecked with girly iron-on patches, fairies and unicorns and blondes with waves of voluminous cartoon hair.
“Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.” He kissed her forehead. “I love you,” he said again and “I love you” a third time while running his nose along the side of her neck, up to the back of her ear. Something told him he could already feel the sickness coming on in the subtle shivers and mild coughing although he wasn’t sure if he was doing the latter deliberately or not. They would take the train, then the bus, then walk to her cramped apartment where he would wait for her to lock the door before he pushed her against it. She would feel his hand on her stomach, groping its way under her shirt and she would remind him to go wash his hands because she knew it wouldn’t be long before she felt him between her legs. “I have a thing about those filthy handrails.” Glances and smiles and they’d be on their way to the bathroom sink. A train howled as it shot through the station.
Coughing and moaning, she pulls herself into bed, him waiting for her, moaning just the same. There’s a hole in his gut and a grumbling gas in his bowels — he’s convinced he could rid himself of the virus if the two days-old fecal matter was evacuated from his body. It sits in his lower abdomen like a parasite, twisting and turning the way a fat worm does, glistening arrogantly, its every motion bloating his belly further. He clenches his sphincter and runs his cold foot up and down her hot, swollen calf, his index finger over her hips, his cheek over her buttocks, one first, then the other. It feels inevitable that she has her eyes closed but when he raises his head he finds them right there waiting for his. She strokes his head as if he were a particularly fragile child to which he puts his face in her armpit, playful and embarrassed.
Each liked to imagine the other as a child, her picturing him grinning widely at the adults around him while making them laugh by contorting his little body into adult gestures and mannerisms, him sketching a scene of her being afraid to play with the other children at her school — he was right about her but she was wrong about him. What their childhood selves both shared, however, was a capacity for cruelty. One of them, kicking a classmate’s binder after it fell to the floor. The other, mocking a girl’s flat chest. She had left that impulse behind but it still bled through in his cold stare, the way he would dismiss people’s problems when he was dealing with problems of his own, the way he waved his hands and turned his head away when he hated a movie.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Tell me you do.”
Sighs then laughs: “I love you. I love you, I love you.”
“Please love me,” as a fat drop of spittle dangles from his puckered lips. Black hair like a helmet, face like a uniform. Watermelon boy, rice bowl girl. Paintbrush bush. Shrimps and hippopotamuses. Spirits watch her lick brown snot from under his nose, watch him hold her hair back as she vomits into the red bucket he put beside the bed, watch her pull out the hairs from his big toe with her teeth and chew on the crumbs that clung to his foot from the white tiles of the kitchen floor. Faces overgrown with skin, fields the color of crayons.
“I want every part of you inside me. Every part, any part.”
She coughs in his face, spit pattering across his skin. He feels a shiver then another — hot for a while, cold for a while, a long time. He sneezes so violently a blood vessel in his eye bursts. Goosebumps to go with the nausea that is spreading from the pit of his stomach, nestling in the back of his throat, throbbing with every pulse of his headache.
“Thank you,” he says.
Crawling like a praying mantis she puts her lips around him, dragging her teeth across his slick skin, smiling to herself when she hears him groan in pain.
A man stood beside them, loudly, desperately asking for change. He thought the man smelled like a strong aged cheese or cured meat, not entirely unpleasant, though the memory of the odor would leave him with a stale taste in his mouth, even make him feel sick once he pictured himself in proximity to the man’s genitals and brown-streaked underwear. Growing impatient, she grabbed her companion by the collar and pulled him towards her in white-hot anticipation of how his weight would push down on her chest, constricting her breathing, making her hungrily gasp for air. The way he had stood for her in waiting when they first met, the way she crossed her legs and folded her arms whenever she asked him a question, the way the stains on her sheets resembled a slender, pointed tree-topper — a dark pink arrow between her legs, an iron rod shoved into a orifice.
The air is heavy, suffocating, rotten, foul, diseased. Her hands are on his throat and he looks at her helplessly. Her crotch is on his stomach, her knees are on his arms, her face is pressed against his ear, her needle fingers puncture his skin, burrow into his flesh. She licks his insides like a ribbon worm, rolling her tongue behind his eyes. Her elbow breaks with a loud crack and he squirms. She bites the inside of his thigh with a violence that makes blood squirt from the corners of her mouth. Little boy, little girl. A cane, a blade. He thought she looked like an angel and forever wondered what was happening behind those big eyes of hers. He was everything she ever hoped he would be.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
Ach!