He said she said it in Mexico City. He said they went to the dominoes hall on a Saturday night and she had a nosebleed on the way there because the pollution was just so bad, like a blanket of soft smog slowly killing us and she had nosebleeds and kept the balled-up tissues in her purse. I never said anything about the nosebleeds because I could tell she was embarrassed, he said, maybe that was my last act of kindness towards her. I think she liked the taste of the blood because I saw her tongue moving up across her mouth when a nosebleed started and she made this little moan, the same moan she made on the nights when I licked her, a kind of grateful satisfaction. He said he liked the taste of his ear wax, so he didn’t think it was gross or anything. We ordered french fries and beer at the dominoes hall and neither of us knew how to play dominoes but I said, there has to be a formula, he said, drinking a cup of coffee on a Monday morning in San Francisco, looking around at the other people sitting near us, keeping his voice down because of all the laptops, and I let him continue without interrupting, but she was sort of drunk and argumentative and insisted there was no formula you just knock shit over, and, anyway, it was a stupid place to have the conversation or maybe it was the perfect place because the cacophony of the dominoes and the men spitting Spanish felt like it sliced open my face when she told me about the violence, he said, lowering his coffee cup and staring at the table, like the fluorescent lights were a fitting nightmare for what she said after we finished the fries but where in this world would a place ever make sense to hear a thing like that, and he looked at me when he said this and I didn’t move my face I just sat there listening with the $3 coffee. I think she was mad at me for telling her I got my ass kicked by guys bigger than me in high school like that somehow made me weak or something, less of a man, although she would never admit it, so maybe that’s why it all came out or maybe it was the beer but she said there were seven of them, seven men on New Montgomery Street in some high-end loft with an original Jackson Pollack on the wall and one of the men was from Australia and one of them was from South Carolina and she couldn’t remember where the others were from, but not that it matters, she said that, she said, not that it matters, and he smiled a little bit, drinking more coffee, his eyes glazing over with the wash of memory, and what a fucking ridiculous thing to say, he said, not that it matters. Haha. So she tells me about the mountain of cocaine and the hog-tied position she was in for hours and the smell of her own shit in the room and the way the soft coke dicks squished in her mouth when she went down on some of them and how I was at home, asleep, and that’s when I stood up and said, We have to leave this place I will throw up if we stay here another minute, and we took a cab back to the Hotel Isabel and she’s the one who threw up in the cab and I called her a fucking gringa. He drank some more coffee and paused. His face grimaced in anticipation of crying so hard that I felt a surge of panic over how to handle this in a public situation, but he coughed and rubbed his jaw and continued. We went back to the hotel and I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour and there were these two cockroaches I caught with a glass and I actually put one in my mouth and I ate it, I ate the fucking thing which was difficult to do because it moved very fast even on my tongue and I had to chomp hard with my teeth to quiet it down and it tasted sour sort of acidic kind of like this underextracted coffee we’re drinking right now but its body went to mush on my tongue and then I swallowed it while I listened to her doing something outside the bathroom door and it was maybe three or four in the morning when I opened the door and she was asleep, naked, on the carpet. He said he took off his clothes and fell asleep next to her. I dreamt I saw our bodies from above, tiny and framed by the patterned carpet and our skin moved like a system with bugs walking the sharp borders of our muscles and I felt the fibers inside me aching with a freak infection that grew sicker and sicker until I became a harrowed leather body with not even enough sense to cut away my still beating heart. Did you order the burger or the salad? The salad, it’s too early for meat. And then what? We got on a bus to Teotihuacan. Two pyramids, one for the sun and one for the moon, built a hundred years before Christ. She didn’t say anything on that bus ride, sat there silent, both a worm and a God. He called her a worm again and then asked if I knew who he was, I said, yes, you’re my friend, and he said, what if I told you I wanted to kill her, like actually push her from the top of a pyramid and watch the dirt swallow her up, would you still know who I am? I watched a certain vein pulse from the temple of her forehead. They slaughtered animals and humans there, sacrificed them to the gods, hundreds of bones found inside the Pyramid of the Moon. This pasta sauce is really good. There was a Doomsday Celebration at Teotihuacan, it was like five days before the Mayan Apocalypse. He said the first words she said that day were in Spanish to a Mexican tour guide standing with a sign that said, Doomsday. He said he couldn’t understand what she said but she told him she asked if there were UFO sightings at the pyramids, and the tour guide said yes, and then she asked if there were more sightings because of the apocalypse and the guard smiled and said, there are more pregnant women here so yes. What? Pregnant women. I heard you, but why? She said he said there was a ritual, an offering of unborn children at the pyramids, and the aliens were in communication with the children. All I could think about were nipples. Here, have some pasta. I’m eating too many carbs lately, like a woman. Whatever. We watched hundreds of people in shorts and sandals wearing fanny packs climbing these giant peaks erected to poke sky like worshipping tits. Climbing up to look down and climbing down to look up. All those oiled expressions on pig faces as bloated as my hatred for her standing there in shorts and tennis shoes on the Avenue of the Dead. My core so jagged it was a dagger. We walked to the Pyramid of the Moon and I told her to lick it. You what? I said, grip it and lick it. She licked the pyramid? She licked the pyramid. And then I kicked her. You kicked her? Yes, in the back of the knee so she fell straight to the earth. She cried out but didn’t turn around, just hung her stinking black hole of a head as she sat knelt before the wall of this fixed thing. Do you hate me yet? Are you all finished here? Yes, thank you, it was delicious. You’re not a violent person. I know. That country that city those pyramids and her telling my neutered bitch dog face that she spread herself for heaving masses of hog blubber meating inside her as I slept not even a mile away and what was coming up from the ground from the mexican earth was this energy you see choking me up and out with waves of misogyny reaching up clutching for my self, cloistering all sex acts like a limpid liquid clamp cranked shut, oh here, let me help you with your bag, do you need to pee before we go? You have such a small bladder. You always say that. I stood up and walked with him to the bike rack where our bikes were locked together, and he looked at me in the daytime light and told me he wanted to pull him and her together asunder with all of their weight, butchering all sadnesses in buoyant blobs, I laughed when he said blobs, of putrid, coagulated sand between those two pyramids until God showed up in that moment of inspired hate-making and offered them a slice of light, or at least a lucid dream wherein she was just a high bird looking for seed. Anyway. The facts are bad enough. Yes. Shambles of apology. Forgiveness? You don’t get forgiveness in this life you get love. Thanks for lunch.
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