The Last Word – Part 3
[image error]Men.
Men and love.
It was like being in the driver’s seat of some huge American car, with power everything: steering, brakes, cruise control. It would start up and take off like a 747, with the windows down and the music playing loud on a massive, sunny six-lane highway, then slowly the day would cloud over, the music would switch to a station that made her feel like the world was closing in. The accelerator would get twitchy and stick to the floorboard, then the brakes wouldn’t work, the steering would lose power and suddenly it felt like she was trying to keep a fifty ton tank from going off the shoulder.
She got mean, then, needling, sarcastic, belittling. She’d push and push, scratch and bite, turn condescending when they placated her. They’d give and give and give, like malleable, half-asleep passengers.
The smart ones with any kind of instinct for survival woke up and left.
The ones rendered stupid by love let her grind them to paste and became irrelevant. She didn’t dump them. She didn’t have to. After a while, they just turned to liquid, leaked down through the floorboards, and were gone.
Carmen’s world was full of nice men. And she ate them. Not one of them ever hit back, bit back, pulled the car over and left her by the side of the road. Not one, until Craig.
Craig came with the car keys and a road map and a fixed destination: a ticket to Buenos Aires that could not be changed. He drove the car. He seduced her. Every time she reached for the wheel, he slapped her hands away. Every time she aimed a dart at his eye, he ducked and fucked her into an exhausted haze. As if he knew there was an invisible thread, strung taut, between her malice and her cunt or some hidden well of rage that could only be depleted through physicality.
He played games without telling her the rules. He moved so fast, there was no keeping up. He was infinitely perverse, as if his brain was a machine for crafting new edges, as if he could smell the boundaries of her tolerance and pushed her to the precipice of each of them. He didn’t give her time to refuse.
The night before he left for Argentina, he took her to the chain link fence that bordered the runway at the airport, and did her there, with her face pressed into the metal mesh, watching the planes take off. An unsubtle ending to a sore three weeks, but Carmen had been in love.
The kind of love that makes you gasp for air, reach to grasp and fail to grab anything that might settle the vertiginous feeling of the plummet. Unsafe, uncontrolled, uncivilized. Love that only has the body as its harness as it walks across the wire. Where only the muscle spasms, the pleasure, the pain, the stink of sweat and the acrid taste of semen ground you and save you from autodestruct.
It had the end written into it from the very beginning. And Carmen learned that it was the only kind that kept her from turning into a monster. She’d kept her eye out for them ever since.
And here, she thought, as the writer closed the door of the shop behind him, balancing the pressed paper coffee tray in his other hand, was another.
