Singing With All My Skin and Bone Read online

  Daddy, I have a knife on my belt. I think about cutting your throat with it, skinning you to make a blanket that I can wrap around Carol and me. All stinking with blood and the sweat of a bear. All stinking with being kept inside a tight bare skin for way too long.

  Daddy, before they took Mama away on the gurney I swear I saw claw marks under the scarf around her neck.

  *

  I stop when the moon is high. The wind is picking up now, not just those little whispers and sighs but a full-on scream, like Carol used to do when she was so hungry and no one was picking her up, like I used to do with my face pressed into my pillow, screaming until my face ached with it. Right now I’m quiet, and I let all that noise settle between my ears, and for some reason it actually calms everything down. Ahead of me there’s a little rise but there aren’t any trees that I can see, the wind kicking the loose snow up into a mist, giving the moon a halo with the faintest kind of rainbow shimmer.

  Top of the world, Mama. I thought that over and over on the drive up here, running on a loop through my brain like a song. Top of the world to you, Mama, you pile of charcoal and ashes. Top of the world to you, Carol, you stiff little ice cube. I’d hold up your fist and declare you a winner anyway, except I have a feeling that your arm would snap off in my hand. Top of the fucking world to you, Daddy, you bear. You coward and you bear.

  You just couldn’t keep it in, could you? You just couldn’t stay in your cage.

  *

  Seated in the snow, I watch Daddy come over the ice floes.

  He pads along on all fours like he weighs nothing. Even far away I see his fur ripple as he moves, its gloss in the moonlight, the snow on the wind making him look like the idea of a bear rather than the real thing. Daddy comes back, and I hope for some kind of apology, holding my dead sister in my arms, but I don’t really expect to get one, because when have bears ever apologized for anything?

  Bears are bears. And I’m me. And Mama and Carol are still dead, and it’s just us now, according to this big hard logic that carves lines through the world and divides you up like a fifth grader dissecting a frog. Cuts you up and catalogs.

  Daddy ran out of options and then he ran away.

  But now he comes back.

  I stand just before he reaches me. His eyes are pits in his head and he snorts, shakes his muzzle, lets out a growl that sounds a lot more like a groan. Like he’s in pain. I stand and I stare back at him, and I hold Carol out to him like a present. Take her, you bastard, I say. Take her like you never could, not you or Mama. Take her and let this be over.

  He snuffles at her. Curls back his lips. Moving so carefully, teeth shining yellow, he closes his jaws around her tiny body, tips his head back, swallows her without chewing. Swallows her whole, undamaged. Gentle. I watch this happen and at last I feel like I can cry, like it’s my choice.

  But I still choose not to. I could have walked away. I choose not to do that, either. I’ve been making that choice, over and over. It’s become my logic. Maybe I never could have chosen anything else.

  Daddy shakes himself again and looks at me. His eyes should shine like his teeth, but they don’t. When Daddy wore his human skin, his eyes shone, because it was all the bear packed into him and looking out of the world. But now the bear is all there is. There’s nothing to shine. He’s all stretched out, inflated, empty inside like a balloon.

  Daddy rears up onto his hind legs. I raise my head, but I don’t turn. I don’t run. Whatever else happened or didn’t happened, no one ever hurt me with hands, and I don’t think anyone will hurt me with claws now. Daddy, I know why you came up here, but why did you bring us? You got rid of Carol in the end. Did that feel good? Are you relieved? What were your plans for me?

  Did you have any?

  I still think maybe I could have left. Instead I’m here. Just you and me, finally a chance for some quality time. It’s become a matter of some kind of principle because that’s literally the only thing I’ve got left.

  Except you.

  Daddy sways, growls again, and drops back to his forepaws with a hard whuff. He noses at me, and his nose is cold and wet and vaguely silky and it feels like the hide of a seal.

  You didn’t even give me a way home, I say, clenching my hands in the fur of his face. Curling my fingers around his teeth, pulling his jaw open. Even if I tried to go, you didn’t even let me have a road. What the hell do I do with all this snow?

  He tosses his head back. I have to look at him for a few minutes before I understand.

  *

  Daddy, you drained the snowmobile. You broke through yourself, ran away, but you made yourself come back. You took away the roads, the light, but you made yourself come back. I don’t know if you meant for Carol to die and I don’t think it matters because either way I don’t think I could ever forgive you. I don’t know if you meant for Mama to die but I almost don’t care anymore. Daddy, you’ve always been a bear, and you’ve always been too big for your skin, singing things you hated in the end, looking at children too small and weak to be yours. But bears can love, even if it’s a love with teeth and claws, and even if you’re a coward you’re still something to ride.

  Bears can’t feel mercy. That’s not what this is, and you can’t fix anything. So carry me back down, Daddy, now that we’re done. Take me back to the lights, back to heat and life, leave me there and be what you are. Be a bear. Let me not be.

  Daddy’s coat is warm and soft under my cheek. He bobs up and down as he walks, and it’s like being rocked to sleep. I remember Carol in my arms, so warm and safe, and even more than that, I remember Daddy holding me, singing his growling bear-songs, trying to love me in the terrible way an animal can.

  We never knew how to love each other, Daddy. Maybe someday we learn how to let each other go.

  Carol is warm in his belly as he carries me—carries both of us—toward the horizon. Toward what’s left of the road. To our left the sun is inching up, giving us a little light for a few hours. It’s precious. For the moment it’s the three of us again, moving out of the night.

  Daddy, we can’t all be bears, and I have no fur to cover me. But there’s a logic in why it’s okay to leave at last. Death is so ugly and beauty is a lie, but the dawn is beautiful, and this is a lie I can tell myself for now.

  I Tell Thee All, I Can No More

  Here’s what you’re going to do. It’s almost like a script you can follow. You don’t have to think too much about it.

  Just let it in. Let it watch you at night. Tell it everything it wants to know. These are the things it wants, and you’ll let it have those things to keep it around. Hovering over your bed, all sleek chrome and black angles that defer the gaze of radar. It’s a cultural amalgamation of one hundred years of surveillance. There’s safety in its vagueness. It resists definition. This is a huge part of its power. This is a huge part of its appeal.

  *

  Fucking a drone isn’t like what you’d think. It’s warm. It probes, gently. It knows where to touch me. I can lie back and let it do its thing. It’s only been one date but a drone isn’t going to worry about whether I’m an easy lay. A drone isn’t tied to the conventions of gendered sexual norms. A drone has no gender and, if it comes down to it, no sex. Just because it can do it doesn’t mean it’s a thing that it has.

  We made a kind of conversation, before, at dinner. I did most of the talking, which I expected.

  The drone hums as it fucks me. We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care. We gave up caring what other people, people we probably won’t ever meet, think of us. We talk about this on message boards, in the comments sections of blogs, in all the other places we congregate, though we don’t usually meet face to face. There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who
we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet.

  The drones probably don’t do any writing. But we know they talk.

  Drones don’t come, not as far as we can tell, but they must get satisfaction out of it. They must get something. I have a couple of orgasms, in the laziest kind of fashion, and the vibration of the maybe-transmission humming tugs me through them. I rub my hands all over that smooth conceptual hardware and croon.

  *

  There was no singular point in time at which the drones started fucking us. We didn’t plan it, and maybe it wasn’t even a thing we consciously wanted until it started happening. Sometimes a supply creates a demand.

  But when something is around that much, when it knows that much, it’s hard to keep your mind from wandering in that direction. I wonder what that would feel like inside me. One kind of intimacy bleeds into another. Maybe the drones made the first move. Maybe we did. Either way, we were certainly receptive. Receptive, because no one penetrates drones. They fuck men and women with equal willingness, and the split between men and women in our little collectivity is, as far as anyone has ever been able to tell, roughly fifty-fifty. Some trans people, some genderfluid, and all permutations of sexual preference represented by at least one or two members. The desire to fuck a drone seems to cross boundaries with wild abandon. Drones themselves are incredibly mobile and have never respected borders.

  *

  Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to get too attached. This isn’t something you’ll have to work to keep from doing, because it’s hard to attach to a drone. But on some level there is a kind of attachment, because the kind of closeness you experience with a drone isn’t like anything else. It’s not like a person. They come into you; they know you. You couldn’t fight them off even if you wanted to. Which you never do. Not really.

  *

  We fight, not because we have anything in particular to fight over, but because it sort of seems like the thing to do.

  No one has ever come out and admitted to trying to have a relationship with the drone that’s fucking them, but of course everyone knows it’s happened. There are no success stories, which should say something in itself, and people who aren’t in our circle will make faces and say things like you can’t have a relationship with a machine no matter how many times it makes you come but a drone isn’t a dildo. It’s more than that.

  So of course people have tried. How could you not?

  This isn’t a relationship, but the drone stayed the night after fucking me, humming in the air right over my bed as I slept, and it was there when I woke up. I asked it what it wanted and it drifted toward the kitchen, so I made us some eggs, which of course only I could eat.

  It was something about the way it was looking at me. I just started yelling, throwing things.

  Fighting with a drone is like fucking a drone in reverse. It’s all me. The drone just dodges, occasionally catches projectiles at an angle that bounces them back at me, and this might amount to throwing. All drones carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, neatly resized as needed, because all drones are collections of every assumption we’ve ever made about them, but a drone has never fired a missile at anyone they were fucking.

  This is no-stakes fighting. I’m not even sure what I’m yelling about. After a while the drone drifts out the window. I cry and scream for it to call me. I order a pizza and spend the rest of the day in bed.

  *

  Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to ask too many questions. You’re just going to let it happen. You’ll never know whose eyes are behind the blank no-eyes that see everything. There might not be any anymore; drones regularly display what we perceive as autonomy. In all our concepts of droneness there is hardly ever a human being on the other end. So there’s really no one to direct the questions to.

  Anyway, what the hell would you ask? What are we doing, why are we this way? Since when have those ever been answers you could get about this kind of thing?

  *

  This is really sort of a problem. In that I’m focusing too much on a serial number and a specific heat signature that only my skin can know. In that I asked the thing to call me at all. I knew people tried things like this but it never occurred to me that it might happen without trying.

  It does call me. I talk for a while. I say things I’ve never told anyone else. It’s hard to hang up. That night while I’m trying to sleep I stare up at the ceiling and the dark space between me and it feels so empty.

  *

  I pass them out on the street, humming through the air. They avoid me with characteristic deftness but after a while it occurs to me that I’m steering myself into them, hoping to make contact. They all look the same but I know they aren’t the same at all. I’m looking for that heat signature. I want to turn them over so I can find that serial number, nestled in between the twin missiles, over the drone dick that I’ve never actually seen.

  Everyone around me might be a normal person who doesn’t fuck a drone and doesn’t want to and doesn’t talk to them on the phone and usually doesn’t take them to dinner. Or every one of them could be like that.

  At some point we all stopped talking to each other.

  *

  Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what you’re not going to do. Here’s a list to make it easy for you.

  You’re not going to spend the evening staring out the window. You’re not going to toy endlessly with your phone. You’re not going to masturbate furiously and not be able to come. You’re not going to throw the things you threw at nothing at all. You’re not going to stay up all night looking at images and video that you can only find on a few niche paysites. You’re not going to wonder if you need to go back into therapy because you don’t need therapy. You’re not going to wonder if maybe you and people like you might be the most natural people in the entire world, given the way the world is now. You’re not going to wonder if there was ever such a thing as natural.

  *

  Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to be a drone. This feels like a kind of blasphemy, and also pointless, but I do it anyway. So simple, so connected. So in tune. Needed instead of the one doing the needing. Possessing all the power. Subtly running more and more things until I run everything. The subjects of total organic surrender.

  Bored, maybe, with all that everything. Playing some games.

  It comes over. We fuck again and it’s amazing. I’m almost crying by the end. It nestles against me and hums softer and I wonder how screwed I actually am in how many different ways.

  Anyway, it stays the night again and we don’t fight in the morning.

  *

  A drone wedding. I want to punch myself in the mouth twenty or thirty times for even thinking that even for a second.

  *

  It starts coming every night. This is something I know I shouldn’t get used to but I know that I am. As I talk to it—before sex, during, after—I start to remember things that I’d totally forgotten. Things from my early childhood, things from high school that I didn’t want to remember. I tell with tears running down my face and at the end of it I feel cleaned out and raw.

  I don’t want this to be over, I say. I have no idea what the drone wants and it doesn’t tell me, but I want to believe that the fact that it keeps coming back means something.

  I read the message boards and I wish I could tell someone else about this because I feel like I’m losing every shred of perspective. I want to talk about how maybe we’ve been coming at this from all the wrong angles. Maybe we should all start coming out. Maybe we should form political action groups and start demanding recognition and rights. I know these would all be met with utterly blank-screen silence but I want to say them anyway. I write a bunch of things that I never actually post, but I don’t delete them either.

  *

  We’re all like this. I’m absolutely sure that we’re all like this and no one is talking about it but in all of our closets is a thing hoveri
ng, humming, sleek and black and chrome with its missiles aimed at nothing.

  *

  We have one more huge fight. Later I recognize this as a kind of self-defense. I’m screaming and beating at it with my fists, something about commitment that I’m not even sure that I believe, and it’s just taking it, except for the moments when it butts me in the head to push me back. I’m shrieking about its missiles, demanding that it go ahead and vaporize my entire fucking apartment, put me out of my misery, because I can’t take this anymore because I don’t know what to do. We have angry sex and it leaves. It doesn’t call me again. I stay in bed for two days and call a therapist.

  *

  Here’s what you’re going to do.

  You’re going to do what you told yourself you had the courage to do and say everything. You’re going to let it all out to someone flesh and blood and you’re going to hear what they say back to you. For once you’re not going to be the one doing all the talking. You’re going to be honest. You’re going to be the one to start the whole wheel spinning back in the other direction. You’re going to fix everything because you have the power to fix everything. You’re going to give this all a name and say it like you’re proud. You’re going to bust open a whole new paradigm. You’re going to be missile-proof and bold and amazing and you’re not going to depend on the penetrative orgasmic power of something that never loved you anyway.

  *