Afternoon in a Darkened Room

I was dead tired.  The kind that couldn't be cured with coffee, tea, alcohol, walking around, daydreaming, inappropriate acts in the ladies toilet, nothing. Now I was in the land of naught, in the tiny treatment room, dressed minimally in tans and whites, like a holiday inn in Virginia, the same I once sailed through with the gypsy family, the tiny coffee maker, our sneaking the german shepherds into the room under cover of night, through the first floor (always requested) sliding glass doors.  My mind couldn't fashion any more distal memories, as he put the needles in, like usual, or what I had come to expect as usual.  Just as when using his elbows to break up the obsessive thoughts and lack of relief I felt in my lower back that day especially, I had breathed into it, I was a pro at wanton release.  I let him separate every part of my ass that he could muster- I'm sorry.  My sacrum.  The place where women hide all their secrets.  At least I do.  I let him go to work, after which he burned me with moxa, causing my arms and hips to involuntarily twitch...I wondered if this lack of control is what my brother feels when he twitches.  No wonder he got so angry all those times.

I was so tired, and couldn't wait to lie there, in that small, dark room with my body, held down as I oft enjoyed (whether needles, or the strong arms of men, or my clothes chosen for the constriction of their vintage tart appeal).  I wanted to hold down my thoughts most of all.  They could slap me like a whirlwind, and give me an instant hangover.  The champagne the night before did me in bodily, but things in the head space are never what they should be, I've come to learn, when I awake at 3am, the witching hour, and cannot go back to sleep.  It was hotter that it should have been that night, and I had felt the bubbles of the alcohol from all day brunch rising through my stomach to my head, so I had the window open again.  I lived on one of the quietest streets in the one of the quietest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but for the cacophony of school buses racing their wares all yellow and bright right after 6am or so.  But it had been dark outside, and they were asleep.  I had awoke and got up for water and the bathroom, and then been back in bed, my ears were working overtime.  I heard everything...especially the insane cries of the many gangland birds who assaulted my eardrums and dream thoughts with their ornithological arguments, the same strangely shaped, small black birds with pointy beaks like nails on the face who wolf whistled at me sometimes on my walk to the bus, making me pull down my skirt and glare sideways at whomever was responsible.  I heard their conversation in my call to fall back to sleep.

Here, back in the room, the needles were in.  My head clamped down by at least five, the usual "tune up" he assigned to my arms and hands, Large Intestine 4, my personal favourite, right next to Large Intestine 5, the "Anatomical Snuff Box"...I loved saying that.  It was like a copper coloured word from the turn of the century, when snuff and spitting tobacco seemed like something viable, as a past time.  I guessed right at my ailments and the Doctor again said to me that I was a natural, and that when I was licensed, I could come work for him.  I hoped again, in a dull, settled way that this might come true.  He dimmed the lights and left the room, only returning to bring in my favourite part: the heat lamp, offering soft heat to my damp stomach, stuck with a sun and moon of needles.  It's hard to keep calm when you have about twenty needles in your skin.

I, however, was aces at relaxing and emptying my mind of the worries of the weekend - his vulnerable eyes, his arguing at me about what an awful, useless person he was, those written words..."I wish you had left me to die, I have nothing to offer you...nothing to offer you..." making my chest hurt, and those wordless moments when he looked at me, after I talked his self effacing logic into another corner, and I looked at him, remembering who we once were, calfs on the way to the slaughter, at the border fence, with not the energy to re-claim our freedom and pull our heavy, lumbering limbs, sunken in the graves of our own mental making, back up into the run, into the wild spaces our brains inhabited.  I suppose I had wasted a good deal of time in the dark thinking of him, of this, of the usual connections and souls that I held around me as an orbit, spinning a waltz of emotional proportion and experience.

I was still so tired, and nearly fell asleep a couple times, shades of grey, a seaside breeze, the water lapping at Bray, how every time I found myself at a beach on Long Island, I'd look out as far as I could see and hope that I could sense Ireland there, waiting for the gypsy girl to return to her drunken, sorrowful boys and their adoring, clueless ways.    But here I was, lunchtime nap in needle land, my body registered with small, but sizable shocks the energy moving up my foot to my leg.  The warm, orange disco ball of light on my stomach, mother to all yet no one.  The session took longer than I was used to, and I kept drifting in and out, trying not to control the situation which was stuck on the fence post in my head.  I heard the tiny voices from the other rooms, and yet none too clear in mine.  A field of war, the past never had enough of to be satisfied, and my absolute joy at this and every moment.  Deity, climax, death chamber and leaves blowing in trees all my children in each second passing, muscles relaxing, brain re-organizing, love reborn, dying and coming and blowing kisses into the next millennium, as I would meet it completely, as I am, as myself.  Capital M.  In the hiding place of my little heated table.

Finally, after more tastes ran their liquids up my spine - whiskey, wine, the fucking glory of a rum at Christmastime, and the thoughts sought to work themselves out, I gave in, further again, you know, when you can hear your hips un-click and you let someone into you, wrap your mind, legs, godhead around them.  It was happening, it could be felt the world over...the door opened slowly and without much sound.  It was a woman- tiny, Asian, of course, in blue scrubs.  The doctor I deduced from all the voices during my time "asleep" was overly busy today.  She took out the needles, after turning up the lights, which I was not ready for her to do.  My eyes barely tried to open even when she was nearly done taking out the needles (not as adeptly and covertly as he did, by the way).  I kept smiling and felt that strange heady feeling that I had experienced before - space, caught and let go, in my recesses, in my opinions, my quiet, dark escape called awake by this day time witching hour.  I wondered if he would ever come out of this rabbit hole.

I remembered early on, when we first met, and he tried to decipher the dead, provincally roman (and grammatically incorrect) words on my first tattoo.  He pulled my blouse over to the side, and perused, as she looked jealous, as I knew her to be.  Something was mentioned about my father, and he remarked that he looked forward to meeting him...she retorted in a start, but with absolute sincerity, "you can't, he passed away a few months ago..."  He had, without missing a beat, said quietly "I'm sorry to hear that".  I had paid my fee, dressed and walked back out into the streets.  The only thing I could think of was how, when he had said that, he seemed more genuinely disappointed at that fact that anyone I had ever met.  The birds stopped screaming in my ears, and I felt a surge of atomic palpations carry me as I crossed the street, back to work.

~ M. Lucia