Maeve Fly

by C.J. Leede

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also … the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop. —Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

This is not an exit. —Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Liz is everything that is abysmal in a human being, and is, consequently, my nemesis. She is both loathsome and curiously fascinating. Liz adores rules, loves adhering to them, upholding them,

I had forgotten. My mind has been … elsewhere as of late.

But anyone who has truly experienced this domestic ostracism, not just the hormone-fueled tumult of the teen years but the great lack of understanding and betrayal that is the total inability to be seen, will understand that this is no simple failing at all.

Now here I am, her double, her ghost, haunting the Strip unseen.

I inhale the air of the early evening, the bougainvillea bloom perfume, the light slanting sideways, long shadows, late heat, and I revel in the glory that is some degree of certainty about life. That is knowing home and fearing no one. I catch sight of something.

The Marquis de Sade’s words tumble through my mind. “In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.”

He has nice lips, I’ll admit, the adjective filthy briefly comes to mind. Not that I would indulge it.

It is perhaps the only imperfect truth about this town, the inescapability of everyone, especially those one does not wish to see again, let alone so soon.

“Because when I look at you, I see it. It’s there, behind that innocent face.” He is mocking me. When I don’t respond, as he was surely goading me to do, he continues. “You’ve got a lot of people fooled, but I see it. The dark. The void. That thing behind it all, the one that threatens to fill and annihilate us, you’ve seen it, and you’re trying to unsee it. So am I. We could be mutually beneficial to each other.”

“So,” he says. The word hangs between us, a question, a promise. And I think that perhaps this is a bad idea after all. I feel a stirring. A restlessness. An ache. Perhaps I—

Since my grandmother’s illness set in and I turned to books for the life guidance she had previously provided me,

Where is the savagery in women? Where is the barbarism?

I have never understood, and still do not understand the notion that a woman must first endure a victimhood of some sort—abandonment, abuse, oppression of the patriarchy—to be monstrous. Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason. But why would she do it? Why, why, why?

never stop moving, fill your time, and fill it wisely.

This man who has the ability to bring me into this body and keep me here. I suppose … I like him. I like being with him. With his warmth around me and these walls full of so much that I love. This room that he filled for me.

“Hey,” he says, reaching out and taking hold of me, his large hand in my hair. I can just make out his eyes in the dark, or where they should be. He is serious. Intensity boring into me, filling the space between us. He’s powerful. He is, inexplicably, not nothing.

From the liquor store, I got myself a bottle of birthday cake vodka. Because I deserve it.

This man inspires it in me. Because of him, I am so alive.

I had thought that Gideon would feel like an outsider here. By all rights he should. But somehow, he suits the space, and it him. Perhaps I have imprinted enough of myself on him to make his existence here work. The walls have not rejected him. And I have not.