Khali was a girl.

Khali was a girl and he can't leave the house.

He wants to leave the house but he can't.

Khali was. A girl.

He's losing weight.

He should eat. He should eat and he can't eat because Khali.

He misses Chelsea and he misses the feel of the sun on his face without the panes of glass and the breeze from outside. He misses the streets after dark and being himself (that was something) but he can't now. Because well, the usual...

He's not sure who he hates more. Khali or the memory of Chelsea. It wouldn't be so bad except for the memory of Chelsea but Khali got to him, tore him down, that's her name don't wear it out, Khali - he tells himself not to say it again - and where is the money coming from this month? Just like last month...

The walls could use a slap of paint. The news and the paint and the time of day and his stomach telling him something he's not listening to and the memory of Chelsea, of the ever present noise of the city and he grits down with his teeth and ignores it and prays the doorbell doesn't ring.

He misses the grime and the girl Chelsea.

He should feel sorry for her. Khali the destroyer. Or angry. Angry. He should feel that way. Or... Or... ...anything at all, but really all he wants to do is exit this room and go for a walk, and go get a little food, but the thought makes his stomach turn and -- He can't leave, and anyway there isn't money because he isn't working and all the stuff he was supposed to do just sort of went away. Khali made it go away. Truth in advertising.

Are you afraid of strong turbulence on planes? Do you feel agoraphobic in malls? Do you wonder what has been in contact with your mail? Do you wonder if cell phone usage causes brain cancer? Power lines in your neighborhood? What your neighbors think of you? Do you experience states of paralyzing panic for no reason at all?

The sun comes through in the mornings as he lays on the stained futon in the corner, the TV still on from the night before. The sun blades down onto his unshaven skin and peels him back into this state of remembering and he feels... unclean. He takes a shower. He has tried not taking showers. He has tried changing soaps, sweating it out in the heat. Sitting in the dark. Not smelling it. Facing the smell of it. All over him. In everything about him. Essence of being. Nothing works.

Chelsea hated the left coast, and once, so did he.
He should never have left. Never come out here.
Here sun by touch and feel.
Khali.

Something... Some hippie bullshit in there somewhere.

The apartment is a five by six. The cable bill gets paid because he doesn't eat. He keeps time by cable news. He would call Chelsea and talk it over with her - she never believed the rumors which by the way weren't true, not that anyone cares or cared or he was probably making a bigger deal out of it than it was certainly, people weren't giving him funny looks as much as he thought and, and... He's got to stop thinking like this.

He feels sorry for her, Khali - that's what it is.

Maybe he's confused.
Or maybe it's true.
He should talk to Chelsea.
No.
He can't.
He can't talk to Chelsea. He doesn't have any idea where she is. She left the city - remember the way sleeping until four meant it could feel for the rest of the day that no one else lived in the city but you? There was a magic about the whole time that --

Stop.
Just stop already. All that stupid romantic... Just stop.
It wasn't romantic. It couldn't be, I mean, look where it got you. Now you don't eat, you've lost twenty pounds on a frame that can't afford it, you're a wire, and you can't even get outside. How is that romantic? Remember the last time you saw someone you know? Remember that? How well that went? And they believed it all, didn't they? It's like being famous or something.

Well, infamous. Notorious more like it, really.
And all because of the destroyer Khali.

Chelsea was all island water and old songs playing on a radio stuck in some different time, some dirty silly romantic run down kind of time. Living on Chelsea time. Nights and her hair - afraid of her as a younger guy. She was half Asian, six years older. Khali was dyed blonde California hair. It was black underneath and she claimed it happened that way by magic and he would have scoffed the way his father did at the land of fruits and nuts but why bother? She was totally bats and he didn't want to deal with it, all that crazy mumbo jumbo, so just humor her and get laid and go home. Yeah, that was a bright idea. That was what they did out West. Still do. Except him, because he can't leave the apartment now.

Chelsea made it all better saying what she said. Not believing it, all the stuff about what made him notorious.

"You'd be a bad rapist anyway," Chelsea ridiculed, "You'd want her to enjoy it too much."

"Huh?" and she knew, as per the usual, that he meant more than just his simple exhalation grunt of a huh.

"Huh?" she mocked, "Your ego would never stand up to it. You need them to want it." Which is a weird thing to say because he and Chelsea never did it although she tried enough.

She's right of course, it's his conceit, remaining fragile and concealed and not wanting to interact and living like a monk. His only conceit really - wanting to remain in the shadows working only for himself and his life. His family and what few friends he had started out with let him down. He gave up on people young. What's wrong with that? He would ask himself.

Well, now it's going to kill him, but...
Chelsea was right.

She liked him he supposes because one night they were out with friends back when he had such exotic things, back before he lost the other apartment in the one day dispute that would not end. A day involving guns, police papers served, and human fecal matter in his mail box. A dinner that ended at approximately 1:36:22am (approximately) and due to the late approximate time Chelsea forgot her purse. She remembered twelve blocks later and he walked her back closing in on 1:57:22am. Approximately. She started calling him Thomas of Aquinas which made no sense but he said nothing and she kept calling him that and eventually he had the impression he was supposed to go home with her, which he did, and see her naked, also check, and sex her to pieces which he um, backtracked from and ended up saying, "Want to cuddle?" or some other atrocious aphorism and mentally puked his guts out.

He hates himself now for behaving exactly the way he did on that night because it makes him look guilty. It makes him feel guilty. Like he's the sort of person not just with something to prove but who was also hiding behind a large and elaborate plan. He's afraid to open the door because of the last day in his last apartment. He's afraid to open the door because Khali might be standing there life-sized, extension of fate and it scares him to death. So he doesn't open the door and he starves a little more. He knows he's got post-traumatic stress disorder. He knows he should see a doctor, have someone in to take care of him - maybe bring groceries or something. But he can't afford it and he can't work up the nerve to talk to anyone on the phone.

Khali sawed down with a knife she had been holding. She could have separated vertebrae, wrenched off his knee cap, made him blind. They took her away after that. She had told her friends, "I've bought a knife." And it got back to him. "I bought it to kill him with." The fluff piece drama of it. Sundamged, ocean fearing, badly acted. The police reports took hours and hours. At least her swing was bad - she was too crazy to swing with any purpose. At least he wasn't physically hurt.

Khali was astute but not smart, ironic but not funny. She had never had a real friend. She was lonely, and in retrospect this should have made him feel sorry for her. Instead it scared him. Scares him more in retrospect. Because Khali did not need friends. She needed fuel.

He has never once, oddly enough, thought about killing her. Or returning the favor of what she did to him. He couldn't even testify at her trial. He should have.

She never ate. Like him. Here. Now. She told him salad Niçcoise meant "to contain tuna". And he laughed that off too. She'd been a model, a real live dim-witted model, a quarter inch taller than him and mean. Not cranky. Not over-bred. Just mean. She was an actress for five seconds. An artist. A film director. A four twenties sex toy. (More like a hundred Hamilton kind of girl, but whatever.)

Khali used to call his answering machine and read her latest piece of twisted erotica into it. She used to ask him what he thought. Niçoise means "from Nice". Not "to contain tuna". This to him, is the West in a nutshell.

To journey into the West, to change, to die, to become one with fate. No wonder the new royalty was born in Hollywood.

Niçoise = "to contain tuna".

He cannot for some reason find this funny. This makes him shake. What would Chelsea have said if she was there when it happened? She would have said to him in her straight, unenergetic way, Go, and don't be scared. Don't look behind you. And she would have mentioned something mythological.

Khali had lots of boyfriends and girlfriends, which did not mean she loved or had lovers. She had companions and sexual partners but not intimacy.

The ceiling, he noticed, staring up the first morning. No job, no prospects, needing to unpack, barely able to move his chest cycling air in and out of his body. He would have stopped but his body was obstinate, and he hates this. He would have stopped breathing. His chest always ratcheted itself back into motion. The ceiling peeling away from the walls. The drooping light fixture in the center of the room. It's that spray on bumpy Styrofoam stuff from the fifties, symptomatic of much more, deeper underlying skeletal fractures, bad wiring, He will at some point have to move again. The mess of the structure around him closing in. Unbearably hot during the day. Drafty and frozen at night. The days stutter change through the windows. He dreads this thought of moving. The only thing that makes him able to cope with this eventuality is that he will be one step further from her. And unfortunately from Chelsea as well.

What did he ever think he would do for a living? He thought he would do this. (Obviously.) It seems pre-ordained now. It's like he's dead-alive, undead, in a wait mode until he shifts over and his autonomic activities cease.

Chelsea used to try and get him stoned and take advantage of him. Khali used to grab it and ask him which of her friends he wanted most. Mr. Thomas Aquinas called it freaky, or weird and laughed it off. Each made him ill in different ways.

Is it possible to be a deity affected by locale? Why is it some people have almost god-like powers? In this attitudinal lifestyle or that. Space, for instance, in his head, making his endocrinal temperature rise, pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream, sour terror out of his largest organ, his skin. The one he's having trouble living in. They're blonde, these people, and they smile and it's easy A's, good schools, whatever you want, Babe.

Thomas Aquinas did not have it that way but he never minded, except for the occasional fit of bitterness, he's not sure, somehow he always got pegged as a troublemaker. Some people have an edge, a thing that's noticeable. Gods (or people who behave like them) hate that.

Being noticed can be worse than dying totally alone and unremarked. Maybe. Well, he's not sure actually. Everyone was noticing him. He was getting ahead. People were taking him seriously. Money had found him, he had even been lucky for the first time in his life with something involving money. His home life had been bad, he worked from sixteen on and got a full ride to school, got out, hadn't had to work during his studies, lucky again, made money as he hit the pavement and then the stroke of luck. He should have been suspicious. He had a moment of feeling he knew how the world worked, secret tickings, and that he had a little real and tangible power. It should have made him nervous. He should have been thinking about the possibilities for disaster, but he wasn't.

Something about this belief that people with this noticeable something must have attracted the two of them - no nonsense hard-nosed little Chelsea, trashy and arrogant in her own way. Brittle fakey-fake Khali with her aphorisms and aroma therapy. His own little dictionary of gods yanking on both arms 'til he split down the middle and his insides spilled out all melodramatic and everything.

Shouldn't gods be required to post a curriculum vitae somewhere - the gods' break room or something? Mess with a life, have reason. Gods internally powered and unknowable. Belief based on... Oh, shut up, Mr. Thomas. Just shut up. They shouldn't have jurisdiction, he thinks, if I feel like I'm from outside them. If I don't believe in them. He's thought it all out, been over it, like he's rehearsing what he feels. Feeling grubby afterwards for thinking about it unable to let go of it. Again like he's got something to hide. He should feel sorry... he feels sorry... not sorry like that, but sorry for someone so screwed up.

Somebody would have said to him, had he had any friends with enough sense, hey, what a piece of work, a phrase he never understood before. Never understanding some things until too late. Part of his personality he has realized over time - not quick but deep (he suspects). He wishes he wasn't drowning in his own deepness, his own ability to think things through now. Over think. Re-think. It's exactly what she wanted. He realizes that the special curse of this god was the ability to create an angry room in his head that he couldn't escape, using his own best character traits against him. Turn his goodness into badness.

Chelsea, on the other hand made off with his innocence, his romance. Stole it outright. An honest gritty theft. And what was his innocent state? Did he wonder about these things? What things? Things like - When he did good, was it really good? What if he wasn't acting for the sorts of reasons he thought he was acting for? What if nobody really cared if he was good? If so, was he still good? Chelsea used to snicker at things like this. Her smogged in hi-rise mentality.

Khali just hungrily ate him.

The power of belief. His locale as a state of being. Now he believes if he leaves the house he'll die. That Chelsea's energy and strength has abandoned him. Her innocent charm. Her angry clothes.

He believes Khali waits outside to devour him again. To pass through the hole of belief to… Mr. Aquinas, you must be joking.

He's become a monk, he's tortured by visions, he can't see past his internal struggle, his spiritual death. He tried to be a good person and this happened - what would have happened if he'd tried to be bad?

Do you go to hell if it was a mistake? The intentions were good. Is it fate then? Like what if something bad happens because you did the right thing? Or the opposite. If you think, Hey, fuck you, God. Just to see what happens. Does the membrane of universal belief and ramifications have room for that? He used to think unequivocally yes. Now he thinks maybe this thing he calls consciousness is more rigid after all. His own perfect theology. He has thrown away advice. He's thrown away empirical evidence. Mr. Thomas can't learn if it's not fit for him to learn. He's not fit for anything. Certainly not, especially not, the unknowable.

He's right where the universe wants him.

He should have run away long ago. Stopped eating long ago. Stopped breathing. Don't turn don't look at the light, focus on the door, the way out of here, turn and look and turn to stone, face forward, wait... wait...

The doorbell. [END]

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These Ugly Elysian Fields by Jay Wright

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HOARD MAGAZiNE