This Thing That Moves and Heaves and Cannot Be Stopped

This room is too fucking cold. It’s not heated til the johns show up. What else am I supposed to do other than shoot up between my toes and get under the covers and let everything go soft. Everything. Like white cotton balls stuffed between my eye meat and my eyelids. And then when the johns come in it’s easy to just let them be one undifferentiated mass, and stay that way. The last thing you want to do is differentiate them, believe me. They got different smells and different tastes but they all got the same body parts, the same dicks, some of them are just bigger than others, some are uncircumcised, some hurt and some you barely notice, and they all pant the same way like stupid dogs, grunting like they’re trying to prove something.

The light out the window of this tenement in the Combat Zone flares then goes out, flares then goes out. It’s like days have become nuclear blasts, like what they’ve been warning us about, what you see everywhere, movies featuring housewives irradiated into white shadows. The whole world ending in a sudden bang. It ends every fucking day here. The lightning in the veins helps it pass a little easier, a little faster, or maybe it doesn’t pass at all. It just helps is all. And after it stops helping it becomes necessary, an airhose you need to suck on to keep breathing. You know the story. Everyone knows the story. It’s the oldest fucking story in the world.

My past is one big undifferentiated mass kind of like the mass of johns’ bodies. There were some good times, sure, but it’s like I’m remembering someone else’s story, something I saw on a movie screen once. Little girl in a fantasy world that is a normal neighborhood of ranch style houses over the New Hampshire border. The corner store I could walk to called The Red Barn. Millville Pond, with its mucky bottom, where I learned to swim. That little girl in a blue one-piece bathing suit collecting pollywogs in a puddle? What ever happened to her? She’s not here anymore. She’s gone. She’s not me. I would protect her if she were still here. Keep her safe and warm inside me. Tuck her in.

For hours I’m alone and I love and hate being alone. For hours I’m not alone and then I want to be alone, but then I hate it when I am. Sometimes I dress to the nines, short skirt, spike heels, hair done, all of it, and I go out with some other girls and we party in the Combat Zone. The lights and lights. Sometimes we party because we’re being paid to and other times the partying is purer. Clearer and closer to the throat. Not a one of us is afraid of dying. We’re past that. We slide right up to the side of death, slip like a needle into a vein. Fuck, we are death, is the thing some people don’t realize. That’s the way we keep our power.

If you allow one john to step out of the undifferentiated mass and become a specific john, then you are fucked. Do not do it. It’s happened to me twice. One was recent, a college boy, same age as me, who looked at me through the layers I’d thrown over myself, maybe even saw deep down into the little girl who walked to the Red Barn and bought penny candy. He could see around the gauze between my eyeballs and my eyelids. Could reach into my chest and pull out my diseased heart if he wanted to, squeeze it in his palm. When we fucked, his back was humped and I smelled corn chips on his breath, and even now I won’t allow myself to remember his name. It’s crazy how quickly people forget other people. Leave em high n dry.

I am in this space, but I know it’s not forever, that eventually there will be a time I look back on this time from and this time will seem as illusory and fantastical as my childhood does now. I try to reach that woman waiting on the other side of this, sometimes I talk to her in my head. I am doing the best I can to get to you, babe. No, I know I am not doing the best I can, but if I tell myself I am and then there is some grace for me. From whom? Myself. I am the only god I can look up to. As a girl I sat in pews listening to priests, there was the Latin Mass and genuflection and there was the dissolving of unleavened bread on the tip of my tongue, cracking the wafer ‘gainst the roof of my mouth, there was the feeling that there was something unstoppable inside me growing, something animal. Now there’s just me. It’s the drugs, of course, just the drugs talking (though there was this kind of talking inside me even before the drugs; I was always a cracked pot, couldn’t carry water. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Damage is real.)

Maybe all this is me taking stock and preparing my escape. It’s so fucking cold in here, but winter can’t last forever. I shoot up between my toes and pull the blanket over me and smell myself molting. Not a bad smell. Not anxiety or fear or hormonal sweating but something completely different. I imagine myself all moisty wet inside a cocoon coming out… as what? Something different. A college student maybe. Ha. A girl with a fucking clue what she’s gonna do next. A woman who’s learned to harness the power and become something else.

I hear the symphony of the Combat Zone through the rattling window panes that need to be pointed and glazed. Old tenements. Business district. The business of flesh, yes. Woman flesh at least. Girl. All those cops and hookers and the sound of music blaring on every corner and gunshots at random hours and the lights from the clubs, the clubs, the clubs. Porno book shops and movie theaters. People die all the time here and you can feel their souls ripped up from the earth, rising , or maybe falling onto the concrete with the wettest clatter. I’ve seen dead bodies fall like sides of beef. Seen life forces disappear from eyes that glaze instantly like marbles or cow’s eyes, suddenly sheened. Heard the sound in the back of a person’s throat that signifies the end. They don’t call it the Combat Zone for nothing, honey.

There are the same characters on the same corners and there are the transients that pass through and there are the tourists and conventioneers, people who believe, the fucking fools, that borders exist, and sometimes I sit in my bed with my blanket around my shoulders and watch it all, and other times I just listen to it wondering how many people die a day here. At least a handful. Wondering why I am in place here. A home for a lost girl with a hard candy shell.

I’m hard when I need to be. You’ve never seen a girl as hard as me. Un-fucking-crackable. Every hole closed tight. A turtle. Scutes interleaving to provide maximum protection. Fuck all y’all. Some of the girls come from right here and have lived in it their entire lives, but more of them are like me from somewhere else. Western Mass, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine. One of the girls is from down South and her accent is a whistle that calls in bad men. Maybe she’ll make it but more likely she’ll be swallowed inside it. Someone will claim her skin. Someone will wear her face out of here. It doesn’t pay to learn names around here.

Sweet memories of watching TV in someone’s basement with a gaggle of other kids and the trees dripping with frozen rain, a hard crust of ice collecting around the end of a branch gripping like a translucent finger, and walking to school slipping on ice, and the smell of floor cleaner in the old brick elementary school as I stared out the window, inviolable and separate from all the others who were then, too, one undifferentiated mass but one that could touch me in psychic warfare. They sensed the cracks in me. Some of the other kids kind, but only because they thought that made them superior. Walking in woods alone then not alone. The flutter of crow’s wings in the woods to hide the original violation. Nothing is sweet forever, kid. And nobody can be trusted.

They come and they go. I take in the poison from their stingers. I soothe their troubled souls. I see all kinds of things in their eyes but it’s best to keep those things undifferentiated. One blob of: hatred, anger, shame. I see murder inside (behind?) black irises and smell it on their breath. And once in a while: utter release. Maybe even pleasure. I do my job and I do it well. I can quit any time I want. Of course I can’t. I am trapped in a web partly of my own making. Then there’s T. There’s always a T. My T is just another T, the one who assumes he runs things but is as beholden to forces outside himself as any of us. Some of the girls walk the streets for T and some us stay inside, and before long I'll be out there again. For now I’m inside. Johns come to me. They request me. I am a flavor that will turn quickly and then I’ll have to go out and solicit. I look younger than I am, but how long can that last.

And how long have I been here? Who was I when I arrived? Who will I be when I leave? In a body bag on a stretcher in a van to a crematorium, a scattering at sea? I was amazed big-eye girl when I arrived. I knew where I was going, what I was doing but of course I didn’t know anything. In some stories this would be where the story starts, suburban girl coming down from New Hampshire on a bus, stepping out in her miniskirt, looking to live a new life. Become something new. Seeing all those beautiful butterflies, black and blonde and wearing thigh high boots with made-up faces. The shiver of a newness growing and glowing inside. T there from the start, taking my arm. A guide to the underworld. This is not where my story starts but it is a part of the story I carry with me now. The feeling of forces moving. Some idiots believe in a god who directs all actions but a more capacious wonder exists in the working of raw coincidence. Why not here?

I slip the needle between toes and reel back. Can’t remember the first time. Remember throwing up in some skanky tenement room with three other girls and two guys. Darkness falling out the window. It’s strange to think you can still see the sunset from windows of the Combat Zone. There were other drugs, all the usual, liquor and weed and coke, but only horse moved like ‘lectricity in my veins and lined my perception up with something I had barely perceived before.

There are eyes on me even when I’m not dressed to cast eyes to me. Some girls draw eyes no matter what they do; I’m one. This old immigrant city in a forgotten corner of cold America. Or maybe it is the beating heart of this rotten fucking country. Some of us know there are wars out there. Soldiers killing each other in far-flung places. Cambodia. Latin America. Real combat zones. We just rhyme with each other.

Sometimes I forget to eat for days on end and I am getting too skinny. Look too skinny and you stop looking like a child and you lose customers. I don’t even need to wear makeup. When I wear makeup it’s like a kid trying to look older and that gets them going but staying fresh-faced I’m like their kid. Sometimes I throw up food I don’t remember eating.

T collects his money and sometimes sits on the bed and looks at me. He says hey let’s get you something to eat and I have to put my clothes on, which is more difficult than you might think, my arms these noodly silicone shapes filled with sand, and everything is effort and I feel slicked with insects, microbes all along those silicone arms, but I pull on a pair of panties and a skirt and I find a shirt in the closet and I don’t match but don’t care, I’m not trying to attract animal eyes I’m going to eat with T, and T waits patiently, at first, then loses his patience and says hurry the fuck up and then we’re out in it.

It never changes but it always changes. New faces, old faces, drunks and neon signs, movement and cop cars passing like impotent sharks, Irish cop faces looking out smeary windows at this thing that moves and heaves and cannot be stopped. They created the Combat Zone. They made it. All the worst vices in the city shoved into four and a half acres and allowed to breed our maggoty stink. Don’t even try to stop it. And some people nod at T and some people look at me but out of the corners of their eyes and if I see one more person looking at me with that fucking thing called pity I am going to cut their balls off, because it’s always men. Women don’t look with pity but something else. Commiseration? Communication? It’s like we are a different species, aliens come to earth to collect information on the men. So we can destroy them. Which will be easy enough. Just wait.

I get food fit for a kid, strawberry pancakes slathered with syrup, orange juice and coffee, and T watches me and leans in and smiles and says that’s a good girl, and I want to slit his throat and see him bleed all over the pancakes, blood mixing with strawberry syrup, but I also see through him to the who he is. He acts tough but there’s a little boy who lost his mother inside him. Other hookers and pimps and johns and petty thieves and drunks and pedestrians and voyeurs sit in their own booths and there’s a cop at the counter with his back all hunched and he’s like one of those whales that keeps his mouth open while he swims. T knows him and claps him on the back and smiles in his face and the cop smiles back and it’s all a put-on, it’s all a show.

And then I’m back alone in the cold room and then there are johns putting their dicks where they don’t belong, and I am overfull of pancakes and hope I don’t hurl on one of them but don’t really care, and I am saying things I didn’t have to be trained to say, all those stupid dribbly words men love to hear, and it’s easy to manage them with just the sound of your voice, a word here or there but an inflected moan just as easy.

Things throb around the edges of perception. Feelings, I guess, but images, ideas, thoughts, things I can’t name. There is no meaning, but there is something. I am not talking about God, definitely not the God who spoke through a fat fuck at Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows but a more numinous and expansive entity. Something pagan or animistic. I feel it all around me, especially in the early morning when I’m alone and there’s the illusion that I’m somewhere quiet and calm despite the roaring of cars at all hours, snarls of traffic, clacking of heels.

They come, they go, he comes again, the humped-back college boy who thinks he knows me and is pretty convincing. He has corn chip breath and when we fuck he heaves his whole self into me, and for once I allow myself to feel that this is not what it is, a simple transaction but something I’ve chosen. Easy enough to choose it out there in the world. I am feeling the last effects of lightning in veins and I allows myself to really feel him inside me and fuck if he doens’t fit perfect and doesn’t seem to intuitively know what he needs to do in order to reach those places that make me cum. Afterwards he lies with his arm slung over his eyes and breathes heavy and smiles.

He wants me to tell him my real name and I say my fake name is my real name but he looks at me like stop bullshitting me and I shrug and feel annoyed with him the way you feel annoyed with someone you actually know. You can’t be annoyed at a john, you can only hate them. He tells me he’s from a small town in New Hampshire that is one town over from the town I grew up in, and he suddenly becomes every boy in that town, the ones I hated and who hated me. The boy in the woods that day when I was too young and small to fight him off. And when he leaves I hope he never comes back but of course he does.

Sometimes all my limbs fall asleep and leave only my brain awake, arms first, then legs, then everything else. Suspended in a bed off Washington Street. Nothing but a brain. There are wartorn areas where people have limbs blown off. Where babies are killed. Where napalm has been dropped. Where whole strips of forest have been laid waste. This ain’t no combat zone, not really, but it leaves behind victims yes. The war-torn.

He wants to save me from this, but there is no salvation because this isn’t hell. I think about the ceiling of the church I grew up in, Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows. One of those high-ceilinged modern buildings built in the late 40’s. Is it possible there are spirits inside everything? Even inside me. Sometimes I’m convinced there is no me I’m trying to get to on the other side of this, there is only the me of now.

T sends me out and I wear the slit skirt and the fishnets and the high heels and my face looks battered now from all the horse. It looked fat and fresh when I got here but it’s narrowing now and my eyes are turning yellow but there’s still a girl like quality to my looks only they’re curdling fast. I lean into car windows and talk shit with other girls and I take the johns back to the room now and they pay me and then leave me and then I have to go out again.

I picture real clear in my mind’s eye what’s to come: the eternal return to the New Hampshire town where I grew up and where my mother still lives. I imagine my face on a milk carton on my mother’s dining room table. Imagine her calling the cops and asking if there’s any news of her missing girl. Imagine her driving around in her wood-sided station wagon searching for me. Imagine her giving in to her worst fears. Imagine her face is my face only older, wrinkled from all the worry I’ve put her through. Imagine coming back to the front door wearing this skirt, these fishnets, one heel broken off, face smeared with old makeup. I am ashamed of the things I’ve done even though I don’t believe in shame.
She will look at me as I stand outside the front door and she will make a decision. Either she will close the door slam on my face or she will go back into the house and get a blanket and drape it around my shoulders and lead me inside as all the crocuses crack the moisty ground and the birds sing welcoming the turning of the earth, and the stones will turn their faces to a sun that will only, can only intensify.

BIO: Jamey Gallagher is the author of two short story collections, American Animism and Bodies in Bags, and a short comic novel, I Am Idris Elba. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County.