Work Text:
“Did you eat?”
You don’t know.
“Harry. Harry–”
You feel an impact, hours away,
“Fuck. God dammit.”
Dora?
“Oh, good, you’re– Harry. Harry!”
It’s loud.
“Yeah, because you’re not listening. Harry, don’t fall back asleep.”
She’s manipulated you upright, and your head careens on your neck. Your vision paints the room around you with hazy yellows and greens, the sun coming through the window in a single golden ray.
She adjusts your collar, tucking a lock of greasy hair behind your ear. The light shines through the frizz of her hair, like a halo of golden bedhead.
“Dora?” you rumble again.
“What, Harry?”
“... I love you?”
She sighs. “I know, Harry. Are you too drunk to work?”
You don’t think that’s possible. “I’m good, I’m good.” You’re on the floor, you realize. Hand, table, get feet under you, use your back– there, upright, without incident.
You puke.
“Nice, you missed the carpet,” she says with a half-hearted chuckle.
“Always happy to–” you spit out the last chunks of bile, “--be of service!”
You both stand there. The pile of sick sits on your glass table, between the bowl of very decrepit oranges and the empty bottle of Commodore Red.
“Alright. I gotta go to class,” she finally says. “And get ready.”
“Yeah, is your– your presentation today?”
Dora looks you in the eye, and her image swims only a little. It’s the alcohol that’s making her look far away.
“That was yesterday, actually.”
“I thought it was on Wednesday?”
“It was. It’s Friday”
“Oh. Well, how did you do?”
“I did great.” Her hand is on the door as she looks over her shoulder. “Thanks for asking.”
And she smiles. Warmth spreads through your face. The bathroom door closes behind her.
__
“When will you be home?”
“Would you even notice if I didn’t come home?”
“I can’t sleep when you’re not. I worry, well, I just miss you.”
“I find you asleep every time I come back.”
“I’ve got to pass out somehow.”
__
There is nothing that could rouse you. No knife in your gut, no screams of the damned, no piss or shit on the crotch of your pants, nothing could convince you to move.
Your religion is oblivion, Harry-baby, and you pray to it every night.
Nothing matters here. Or at least, it doesn’t feel important. Every thought that demands your attention every second of every day seems perfectly inconsequential. That’s zen, isn’t it? Living in the moment.
This moment of complete obliteration of the self.
For these moments, you do not exist. Your failures, your body, and your past fly to the wind where all other forgotten things go, with the electricity bill, your work schedule, the anniversary of your mom’s death, the look that woman gave you when you told her her son needed to be identified at the morgue, the water bill, your dry-cleaning unclaimed, a child with his throat slit, a puddle of vomit hardening next to the bed–
That’s zen, isn’t it?
__
Dora is painting, smacking her gum as she thinks.
You’re doing your casework across from her. She’s painting sunflowers.
“Harry, what do you think?”
“More orange, maybe?”
“You’re not looking at it.”
You look up. “Yeah, more orange right at the little– the petal edge where the light’s reflecting.”
She turns the canvas back around. Her paintbrush behind her ear, her face has a smudge of yellow where she leaned on her hand. “Hm. You’re right. A little more burnt sienna.” The circles under her eyes are darker.
“Did you sleep much?” you ask, and she purses her lips, blowing a bubble.
It snaps, and she sighs. “Not really. It’s cold. So, if you could get the power back on, that would be great.”
“Oh? Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get on that.” You grab your glass as you stare back at the page in front of you, and drink. The bitter taste goes down. You look at your hand, and you’re holding Dora’s paint water mug.
You stare at each other.
“Don’t let me stop you,” she finally says.
You laugh, and she laughs, and God, isn’t that beautiful? She laughs, and she’s beautiful, and her smile stretches her cheeks and eyes, and God, she is beautiful. You could never forget that.
__
You’re about to pass out.
You’re about to pass out.
You’re about to pass out.
Just get yourself home.
Where are you?
__
Maybe because you met her drinking.
But when you’re sober, you don’t have the confidence. You feel like you’d dirty her skin if you touched her under her clothes. You wash your hands before peeling an orange, don’t you? How do you wash a soul?
But God, God! She tastes like any woman, but her legs settle around you like you still mean something, even now. You could write sonnets for a woman like this. People fight wars over women like this.
Why don’t you, then?
You imagine she walks in this filth unsullied, but shit sticks to her shoes like any other broad. People don’t live like this, in apartments caked with grime and dried alcohol and dusted with coke. This kennel isn’t fit for a dog.
__
The sunflower painting is sitting on its easel. She’s sitting on the plush chair, slightly at an angle to it, and you’re standing about six feet back.
“I mean. It looks like sunflowers.”
She looks at you with a slight sneer. “Thanks. Very insightful.”
“I mean, it’s fantastic, obviously. Your technique is on point. You’ll get an A.”
“... But?”
The silence trails on long enough that you stupidly decide to fill it. “Well, it’s– I mean. It’s a little lifeless, isn’t it?” It’s a far cry from the vivid color-work that stunned you in her earlier work. The implications of life and love in still-life scenes, to her cityscapes of brilliant sunrises and sets over the slums of Revachol. Her brushstrokes made a child’s broken bicycle mean something.
“How do you mean?”
“Impressionism is supposed to invoke like, mood and light, isn’t it? It’s– it’s nice, but it’s just a vase of sunflowers.”
Dora considers the painting. She stands up, running her hand along one side of the canvas. “It was supposed to be ‘just a vase of sunflowers’. So.”
“No, I’m sorry. It’s lovely! It’s beautiful, you should be very proud of it,” you say.
Her body snaps towards you. Her hair follows after her, just a second or two behind, in a wave of gold. “You said what you meant. And you’re right! It doesn’t invoke the illumination of the Republic or whatever you were hoping. Because it’s a painting of fucking sunflowers.”
“I’m sorry! Dora, Dora, I like it, I thought you wanted constructive criticism, I just–...”
“I do! Tell me everything that sucks about my painting, I want to fix it, Harry, believe me.”
“You just used to paint– I just like it when you’re more experimental.”
“Well, right now, I look at a sunflower, and I see a sunflower. I don’t know what you see anymore.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. No, you’re right! You’re always right, I should start over.”
“God dammit, I’m sorry, Dora! I shouldn’t have said anything!”
“And lie instead?”
You stand there. You just stand there.
And she finally turns away. Her face, her eyes filled with such silent rage, leaves you with a painful knot that you can’t swallow down.
“I don’t know. I just see sunflowers these days,” she says quietly.
Your hand offers little comfort, but you stroke her shoulder all the same. “That can change, Dora.”
Your eyes meet. She is so much more tired than you remember. She is leaving, already, and you are doing nothing.
“Maybe,” she says eventually.
You don’t think there was a right choice there.
__
You are floating, again, in perfect nothingness. You are fetal, warm, and safe. You reach, and she is there on your fingertips. You know her by smell, even in the darkness.
You only wish you were smaller. Small enough you might fit inside her completely, and her body would eat you away until every cell that had ever been you was lysed and consumed.
I pity any molecule that has ever been named Harry Du Bois.
__
Did you eat today?
“One kebab, three glasses of wine, two lines, and a boofed shot.”
Harry? Harry? Are you in there?
“What’s going on?”
Harry? Fuck, I’m getting the doctor.
“Hello? Dora? What’s happening? What did I do?”
__
“They’re not renewing the lease.”
You blink. “Fuck.” It’s not unexpected.
Dora puts the letter down in front of you. “My parents won’t cosign again either.”
You inhale, and exhale. “Okay. Okay. I know some people renting under the table. I’ll start talking to them.”
You hear the caws of a gull outside, growing quieter and quieter as it flies away.
“I had an interview last week.” She’s pushing the papers on the desk into slightly more organized piles.
You didn’t know she was looking for a job. “Oh? Why are you leaving the Académie?”
“I did quite well, despite it being over the phone,” Dora said. She looks out the window, at the bricks of the building next door.
“For what job? Another professorship, I assume?”
“Yes. At the Academy… in Mirova.”
Mirova? That’s not– where is Mirova again? It’s in–
“My old advisor put in a letter of recommendation, which probably helped but–”
“ Graad? Why the– I can’t– Why do you want to go to Graad?”
She looks at you. You look back.
“I can’t– I can’t go to Graad.” Getting the work visa alone– Dora, no, her parents can afford that, but you sure as hell can’t.
She looks at you.
And the realization snaps you in half over her delicate white knee. The yawning chasm that opens in front of you– No, you fucking moron. You’ve been walking straight towards it for six goddamn years.
“You’re– Dora, you– you can’t– Dora–” You grab her arm, and pull her forward, you hug her waist, and she is tensing, but you don’t let go. “I know it’s been shit, and I– I’ve not been who you deserve. I know that. God, I fucking know that. Graad? Graad?”
“Harry– let me go.”
“No, you’re not gonna leave me. Not again. I love you– Dora–” You put your head into the crook of her neck, and begin kissing every inch of exposed skin. You taste your tears as they mix with the sweat on her skin, and breathing in her perfume. Apricots. Apricots.
And she’s pushing against you. You’re pathetic, grasping at her, at her hair, at her clothes.
“Harry! Harry, you’re hurting me–”
She yanks herself away, her shirt tearing in your hands. She stumbles back, her panicked breath almost covering your choked sobs as you take a stumbling step towards her.
“Don’t come any closer!” she yells. She yanks the chair in front of her like a shield. With her eyes wild, her bra exposed, you can see her chest heaving, the skin moving over her ribcage, like the animal you turned her into.
And you finally stop. You feel hot. And heavy. And you can’t see. You can’t fucking see, the tears. Dear God, what are you anymore?
“Harry. I’m leaving.”
“Dora…” you moan.
“Harry, get out. Go to Patsy’s or some shit. I’m going to get my things, and if you’re here when I’m dressed, I– I’ll call the RCM.”
You bark a laugh, you can’t help it. You laugh, and you put your head in your hands, and roll it back and forth as if you could shake out what you just heard.
You stand there. Shaking.
She closes the door to the bedroom.
You just stand there.
__
You come back, and she is not there. Her clothes are gone. Her toothbrush is gone.
Her painting is still on the easel, the sunflowers benign in their vase, and her paints are still on the table. She left a note with the number of where she was staying.
You drink every pot of paint she has, one after another. If alcohol and methamphetamine wouldn’t kill you, maybe cadmium or chromium will, maybe this is the one thing of her you can fucking keep–
But they come back up, with the wine, and the beer, and the vodka, and the rum, and splattered across the floor, they could have been beautiful.