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Faceblood
by Brian David Vass

It was in these happy days that the weight of our affection undid the weight of our world. Responsibility as a token and as a real thing funneled into the sustenance of ‘us’. To say so without waxing caustic makes me happy. So happy.

2
We met on a Wednesday. She was with a group of her familiars and I was with a friend (whom I quickly abandoned, incidentally). We had come to an unfamiliar hamlet not knowing we would find each other and not knowing we would stay far longer than we had any right to. Just a small town, with wheat on either side of it, and that night: a fire.
A party.

Our acquaintance was made gradually, facilitated by mingling and music and alcohol as so many new friends and boyfriends are. She wore a poised look for most of the night, while I indulged sloshed bemusement. After we had been introduced and had sipped a few quiet beers together she began emulating my grin. Later I asked her if she could hold a straight face. We both tried but were too drunk and happy to do so.

As we sat in front of the fire that first night I cannot tell you how many times our eyes met. It seemed we both possessed the same sick talent for over-actively assessing a potential mate. For us the beer or the scotch was a blessing indeed, for how else was our pattern of overanalyzing exteriors to relax into obscurity? And so it was, minor skiffs of iridescent skin cells were sloughed away into an alcoholic dis-focus. Blemishes melted into beauty under the heat of fermented brews until, of a sudden, we found ourselves confronting exemplars of the human form. She, a goddess among women and I her nervous god.

Surprisingly, we did not have sex that night, though everyone else and their dog seemed to be hooking up. A rare occurrence in this place, all that sexuality, and not repeated lightly. What we did do, was kiss.

The first time I leaned in to kiss her my mouth formed an ‘O’ and my tongue fell out onto hers. It looked more like two children touching tongues than a kiss. We pulled away from each other and she wrecked me with a look, smiling.

----That was a joke right?

----Of course, I assured her. I had begun to sweat.

We tried again. This time I performed nothing short of the most ill-composed embrace of my life. ‘Fumbly’ rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. Again she pulled back and
admonished me. She seemed serious,

----If you strike three, you’re out.
She gave me a shake.
----Now kiss me.

I did. Dexterously; exquisitely; endlessly.
We passed out in one another’s arms.

3
We later discovered two things: we were hung over and we had mutual friends in this town. Friends whom all were partners in the ownership of a certain house. Regarding this house, we made further discoveries. Most poignant: that we were welcome to say (what the hell, it was summer). So we stayed. For a month, we stayed. Our relationship, the adhesive holding us to this particular slab of earth. And what a slab!

A geologically influenced cluster of folks comprised the citizenship: well-meaning and equal to their tasks. Plop in the left ventricle of the North’s agricultural heart, was this place- not thirty minutes away from a slightly larger cluster of well-meaning and adequately executed individuals. The town itself: bare of anything save a few houses and a post office. The kind of town where, if you found a reason to stay and sustain a modicum of life for an equally miniscule time frame, might find yourself residing-abiding in a peculiarly particularized bliss. Like that of the Zen monk who upholds the world in secret by sitting on a rock.

Sitting on rocks partially describes that summer, as life progressed slowly and with the sloth’s unique terms of endearment.

Money came to us, I forget how. Always enough to drink and smoke. Always enough to make a run into the larger town for supplies. Weed we shied from. It made her nauseous and me crazy. We spent a lot of time at the post office, too. We liked to kiss inside it, or ‘snog’ as the English say, at midnight, with tax ballots or stacked flyers for company. We did this mostly when it was too muggy or buggy outside and too crowded in the house we were at.

It was new to me, this relaxation. This uncanny suspension of discontentment. New it was, too, not to rely on entertainment offerings in large cities to shoulder the deficit of my attention from one rising of the Sun to the next.

We became enough for each other, gradationally. Every night as we laid on our backs, peripherally digesting the empyrean array and recycling the tense parts of our lives as ‘funny stories’, we graduated into new dimensions of the word ‘Intimacy’ as could only be adjudicated mutually and consummated sexually.

Only in this place could that have happened. As I said... what a slab!

4
One morning we decided to go to Church.

It was one of those mornings where you know you’re going to drink heavy, because you only drank six or eight drinks the day before. It was also a beautiful morning to be out of doors. A morning where the word ‘crisp’ flits in and out of your mind’s eye like a rogue insect--a phenomenon owing its origin, I suspect, to years of Reading and its prehensive affect. A morning to wish whatever wet smell lingered headily about would amplify itself, fill your nose, and drown you in naturic bliss for all time; yet the scent remains faint and lends itself to humanity as a hint of untainted virtue.

We planned Church for the adulterated variety of it. Why not? A little Profanity to balance the sick-sweet Sacredness we continued to locate in the Wee! hours. It seemed a good idea. It proved to be one.

She sat beside me. The bare leg brushing mine tickled slightly. She was wearing short shorts and a pretty sleeveless yellow top. Her modest breasts sat up nicely, her nipples smoothly concealed by a bra, the donning of which I witnessed. The milk-white skin of her face trended into an elegant neck, then further into barely hairy arms; that soft, red-feminine hair. She looked like she fit at Assembly, exuding a swarthier contriteness though she may have been, and it made us both feel more comfortable.

We behaved ourselves, though not without the occasional, nominal flush of displaced irreverence. We studied the Bible that was in the seat in front of us. We studied the hymn book. We observed the rites, standing and sitting with the rest of the congregation.

It was a Catholic church, unmentioned in my delineation of the town’s faculties and traits only because it would have preferred to be so. A structure comprised of Wood and Faith that put its head down and did its quiescent work of stabilizing the meek spirituality of the town’s few residents while waving off anything that aspired to whiff of excess.

We loved it as we loved the wind.

PART II
5
----So you’re going to write a book about me?

I had told her I was a writer. Before the hours of sitting and intimation. Before the Sun in our window every morning, bleaching the overused blankets we had intended for one week’s use. Before the flies got to us. Before getting sick at the sight of our minimal wardrobe. Before falling in need with our wardrobe’s queer and vastly reminiscent scent. Before Church. I had told her: I am a writer.

----I’ll write it. It will be hard. Difficult, I mean.

----Why?

----I don’t know. I guess it just feels like we’ve met before. And that makes it difficult. Because, you know, which one of you do I love?

My answer effected a subliminal reel. The subtle channel between us twisted and jerked, threatening to break. It felt unreal. There was uneasiness.

----I don’t know what you mean.

----Neither do I.

I readily admitted as much. I told her I wasn’t sure where that had come from and tried a laugh that shook itself to tiny pieces. I told her I meant only that nothing is simple, least of all love, and one’s own love is hardest to pen. That cheered her, though there was a new heaviness and we had difficulty fucking it away.

6
That night I awoke sweating. We had made love earlier and she was lying next to me in all her moonlit glory. The love was prime, as usual, but the dream was not. It had been wretched. A rancid, fear-soaked drama. In it, I left this woman, this beautiful partner I had so recently found. I left her as we walked a path we often walked when we were bored. A path we had indiscriminately cluttered up with cheap beer cans and empty mickies of hard stuff. A road we knew, but why then was I walking away from her without even saying goodbye? Why could I not look back? To where was I being pulled? After that night, I continued to have the dream.

7
A discussion about our living situation, a matter grossly obfuscated by our feelings, daily ensued- towards the end.

We abode in the same City; yet we could not or dared not return. A curious thing, this, and curiously justified.

She said, There’s something about bonkaroo with only soft wheat out the window. She said, There’s something about summer here. She said, Let’s go bowling tonight. She said, Let’s go to the movie tonight. She said, Let’s just lay around and read today. She said, Let’s get fucked up tonight.

She said,
----Why go home yet?
We did not want to. We drank twenty beer each. We did not go.

It became an ‘issue’, this suggested return to our respective homes- the distance between which by no means superficially threatened our hopes at physical or relational closeness. Round this issue polarity reared its vitalized and venerable brow. I pressed the topic into the fabric of our conversational tapestry, and she sank deeper into the tapestry’s folds, hiding behind material more pleasant to the touch. Her shyness was precious and I desisted more often than not.

The sense it made, the sense of staying in this place, was deeply feminine and evaded definition by rite of its genesis. We loved where we had fallen in love almost as much as we loved each other. We could not know this. Even our clothes had become interdependent to the sustenance of ‘us’, and the sustenance of ‘us’ was becoming stretchy and sinkful. Yet beautiful and wholesome and unbearable to be without.

We were fixed, together. Yet only here was that a certain fact.

We stayed, though the heat was bad some days and other days it was the wind.

8
It happened one day that I visited some relatives in the larger, busier city. Joined, did I, the group of folks whose collective autopilots limned a qualitatively more intricate pattern of cross-references and inter-action than humble Benson, small feat though this was.

While I was there, enjoying wonderfully aged faces, gleefully regurgitated exchanges and impeccably prepared yams- I thought of her and only her. The two days I stayed constituted the experiential definition of crystallization. Painful, exuberant; ironically enjoyable both during and subsequent.

I tried to remember her face; I could. I tried to remember my head on her chest, rising with her inhalations and falling with the ex; reading Don DeLillo while she read Stephen King and being unable to concentrate on the words for all the damn bliss; ducking for cover at the post office, a last ditch effort at romantic love, while our hosts threw a party; I could. Yet these very recent memories were already becoming obstructed.

It was a riddle, simply. Why must we stay in this place? And why had I said that it felt as if we’d met before? Why will it be so hard for me to write a book about her; to name her? Why was my oneiric life harrowed with worry? Why did the chthonic palpitations of my subconscious produce images accompanied by emotions that can only be described as justified and horrified images of me leaving? Tomorrow.

I sat late into the night. Wakefully sleeping, yielding to a flow yet nubile to my awareness, giving up control to the massage of idleness that carried me toward conclusions.

That night I dreamt a poem.

9
I am by the dirt road. Its crop of potholes rivals its litter of divots and we have traversed its pocked face often enough to recognize, if not offer jilted empathy to, each mark. She is standing serenely by. Our hands are held. I am asking God a question about why I keep coming back here. She is smiling into an Expanse I cannot see. I am dropping her hands and now I can see what she sees and the apprehension of it nudges the Universe. The Wheel, receding to a single spoke. I cannot speak. I am asking God again, why do I keep coming back here? And not just I, but us. And not just the two of us, but all of us. Returning to a place we never left, introducing ourselves to people we always knew, falling in love with those we never stopped loving, from life to life and death to death, as if what’s new is nothing but a new translation of the same damn book. The book we love to death and back to life again. The narrative we haltingly digest larger pieces of, from one infinity to the next, and are co-opted by in the end or beginning, by fate’s stylistic pull.

And then she is kissing me and then I am gone.