Fight Gravity
Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empire. While everything forgotten hangs in dark dreams of the past, ever threatening to return.
Jack sees everything. Imagines more.
He hears them through the walls. Shouts, curses, gurgling shrieks. Imagines he can hear the ret: soft skin rasping against softer, chapped lips pressing and sliding together, racket of racing heartbeats.
(Curt had moonlight and wolf-howls in his blood, too; Jack was, is, enthralled.)
Another gin; he drinks it down in the time it takes one of them to come. Such a lovely image, one of those pale faces gone rosy and damp, wide mouth twisting into a smile-grimace, narrow chest heaving with exertion. And the other, rolling onto his back, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
Are they tender afterward? He hopes so.
Two pairs of bony fingers knitting together in the mess of sheets, a square thumb tipped with dark lacquer rubbing slowly across the other's knuckles.
Oh, yes. He likes that picture; he'll keep this one. (Curt, in Berlin, tangled hair, painting Jack's toes.)
No one notices him. He's just the wasted old queen tripping through the halls in his kimono and huaraches to fill his ice bucket, yesterday's rouge gone muddy on his cheeks, spiky-helmeted viruses rioting like Huns in his every cell. He's a ruined castle, long past falling, holding himself together with the glue of nostalgia, imagination, desire.
On the balcony, he smokes skinny Yank menthols. He smokes everywhere, drinks all day, mint and juniper coating his lips and tongue like, in another life, a dream now passed, Curt's spit and sweet lipstick once did.
Rain coming this morning. He tugs his wrapper more tightly around his chest.
One of the boys, the quieter one, lifts his chin in greeting from the next balcony over.
Jack offers a smoke, relishing the warmth of the boy's fingers, then plays Cassandra. Chicken Little.
"Beware things falling from the sky."
(Curt, leaving.)
Whatever part of him isn't a changeling is a pop star, in that strange understated way of modern pop stars.
Steely clouds, flat-bottomed and slow-moving as ironclads, have been gathering all morning at the horizon. The light's dim, oblique, the beach empty apart from skittering popsicle wrappers, the odd beer can.
"Might want to go inside," Oz says, stubbing out his cigarette.
"First day in forbloodyever I'm comfortable." Charlie spins an umbrella between his palms, one knee jiggling, bracelets jangling. "Bloody hot here."
Dropping the umbrella, Charlie pulls himself up onto the railing. Like a monkey, squatting and grinning, balancing precariously.
It's Oz's job to get him down.
"Charlie --"
"Catch me, won't you? Throw your supernatural strength, yank the stupid junkie back from the edge?"
Charlie doesn't believe in the wolf; that's okay by Oz. He wishes he didn't, either. Two weeks in this shit-ass motel on the Florida panhandle, he's never going to get his story, and he's falling in love with a has-been who hardly ever was, one hit wonder doppelganger.
"Depends," Oz says, looking up at Charlie tottering on the railing, arms spread like that Jesus statue in Rio. Silver clouds all around him, profane haloes shivering and coldly burning. Oz is about to stand when Charlie throws his head back. His back arches, the wind picks up, and rain starts to fall. Huge, fat drops that careen in, carpet-bombing.
Charlie's soaked and delighted, laughing in his arms as Oz hustles him inside.
Kissing him, Charlie grips Oz's head and shoves his knee between Oz's legs, pulls him down to the bed.
"Something for you --" He rolls away, digging in the shaving kit he keeps his smack in, and Oz tenses. But all Charlie offers is a battered green pin, junk-shop chic. His smile is shy, eyes downcast. "Used to be Elvis's. So I heard."
Blood and tarnish cannot hide the stone's gleam. Oz turns it in the silvered light, keeping time with the rain.
Every night I tell myself, "I am the cosmos, I am the wind". But that don't get you back again.
Down here, the stars are different from any he's ever seen. Claire knows their names, tries to teach him constellations, but Charlie can't keep track.
Icicle-bright, so close he could reach out and touch them.
He keeps his hands under his head. Stars sharp as needles, falling, piercing. If he touches, they'll prick his finger.
The island doesn't need any more blood; Charlie doesn't need to spill any more. Not his own, not anyone's.
Ethan's blood ran pale in the pounding rain. The mud was realer than his shrieking face, darker than his blood, and swallowing it all. Charlie touched his face, chipped nail-polish shining like night against the blood.
Down the beach, someone laughs, a bark like a hyena's, a dingo's, and claps their hands.
"Shooting star!" Shannon calls.
Charlie shuts his eyes. Falling things -- rain and stars, needles and bullets, blood and more blood -- and no net.
He fell out of the sky, out of the world, out of memory.
History is written by the victors. He wonders if Oz ever did finish that story he tracked down Charlie to write. Where is he now?
"First rule," he told Oz, "is you don't say the O-word."
Oz set down his drink. "Any O-word? One in particular?"
"Manchester-born, two brothers, platinum-selling O-word," Charlie said.
Smiling, Oz's mouth twitched. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Charlie liked this bloke. It'd been a while since anyone listened to him. "Right, then," he said, getting bolder, "nor the bloody Beatles."
"Always reminded me more of Big Star," Oz said. "Superficial resemblance, sure, but -- Chords, they're all Chilton, very little Lennon."
A smart journo, too. Charlie thought his luck might be turning.
He was wrong, but it felt good at the time, for awhile. That first night they fucked, and Oz's rosary snapped, beads falling everywhere.
Charlie wakes the next morning with sand in his mouth, rain soaking his shirt.
No shelter here. Exposed to everything, still falling, forgotten.
Sources: Title and summary from Ani DiFranco. Section headers, in order, from Haynes' Velvet Goldmine; a passage about Oz by KindKit; and Big Star's "I am the Cosmos".