The House of the Dwarves

Or

How to escape the tiny dark path

“You were born bad. It just took me to bring it to the light.” He whispered into my ear. I stared at our reflection in the mirror, my shoulders sharp like a frame as he fucked me from behind. I looked bad, my mascara ran down my face and my breasts swung weakly up and down as he rutted against me. 

“I’m just eclipsed by your badness at the moment.” And that’s how I felt with Fred. Eclipsed. Outmatched. 

My blonde hair had somehow lost its sheen since I’d last concentrated on my physical details. A hundred tiny, light lines patterned the sides of my eyes and the frowns of my forehead. Time was bad, not me… I just wanted to feel good, always good. I just wanted to slip from here to there like a breeze going from one sunrise to the next.

“Oh, Tabby cat. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the dark or in the light, you’re a bad girl.” He took a bunch of my hair and jerked back my head so I could only see a spinning view of the ceiling. I was sinning in almost every way there was to sin, so I supposed I was bad; but he was worse.

“You’re a bad boy.” I said, losing interest in the sex. I couldn’t cum and I was getting anxious. I knew that whether I was inherently this, or inherently that, my high would soon fade and I’d feel like shit. Feeling like shit struck me as far worse than sinning. We needed more. 

Fred truly was a bad boy. We were fucking in his mother’s house while she cruised around the Mediterranean. We’d pawned one of her old mink coats to buy the coke. On entering her living room we’d smashed a vase, a reading lamp and stained an antique chair in our drunken effort to find the light switch. Fred had a swollen black eye from this evening’s bar brawl. The fact that it suited him, well, it said something.

“Get off me for a minute.” I said. 

“What happened, is it the hair pulling? Too much?” He let his hands sneak to my waist. I often wondered what Fred wanted. From me, from his mother, from drugs. I didn’t pretend to understand men’s desires or women’s but I found his motives unwaveringly obscured, a frustration that often led me to rage and fear. How could the man I most loved remain so firmly ungraspable? When sober, Fred enjoyed reading political strategies for peace, and decorating the house to resemble a womb, he kissed my neck and told me that all he wanted was THIS HAPPINESS we had between us. His conflicting selves, neither one believable, like TIME itself, made me need to get to his bottom.

“I don’t feel it anymore. Let’s go to Mo’s.” 

Just beyond the heart of the city, off a circuitous path from a less popular road, stood Mo’s. If you found the correct path amidst a cluster of indistinguishable brown apartment buildings, bleeding into a residential park, you’d see a small house with an iron door. In the center of the door was a rectangular window. Illuminated by the dimmest of lights (when open for business). If Mo had seen you before with another client or you appeared unsuspicious, you handed her the money and she gave you the best coke in the city, or at least the most constant. I assumed the drugs were police contraband, some sort of dirty blindness that benefited everyone except the people like us. 

The house had been around for ages, since Fred first started using, twenty years earlier. A friend had brought him one sunlit day, but that’s his story. It used to be a last resort for us but we’d deleted the names of our dealers in bleak hope of cleaning up, and in the last month it had become rote. 

We stumbled out of the taxi and into the quiet, shadowed street. It was nearly two in the morning and the bars were closing. I saw a familiar couple embracing next to a garbage can. I’d thrown a drink at the girl’s face the week before for telling me to quit weeping so loudly during her bachelorette party.

“Do you think we’re too late?” I asked, tugging at Fred’s sleeve so that he’d move faster. Were all my lovers versions of the same man? Was I in love with a ghost as usual? 

“Don’t worry, Catsy. Since when did this become so much your game?” I remembered fucking Fred for the first time. Afterward, I lay awake thinking of fated, lovers…

 “Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”

Fred inspired tragic passion even while snoring and talking in his sleep. He had been honest about his addictive behavior since the beginning and his vulnerability had fooled me into thinking I saw him. I’d lost my head in those first few hours curled against his back. 

Fred muttered something about home as we descended the path to Mo’s. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except getting to the iron door before Mo stopped selling. Not getting more was unthinkable, it made my heart race and my personality falter. The path light flickered in threat and I didn’t consider what home Fred meant in his mumblings. His hand felt cold and clammy although the night was warm for December. I’d forgotten to lace my boots in our haste and my tights kept falling down my waist. Fred wore his green army jacket and had a strange expression on his face. I didn’t recognize it as one of his bad boy signals, it reminded me of something from a childhood book, a child who enters another world and can’t find their way back.

A tall man stood in the dirt clearing in front of Mo’s. He looked familiar but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him. He wore a black wool coat and a brimmed hat with a brown leather satchel snapped around his waist.

“Fred, you knock.” I directed in a whisper. Fred was looking at the man. “Who’s that guy? Do we know him from somewhere?” Sometimes on these drug fueled journeys I got scared. A sudden drop of the high, or a surge of paranoia and I would recall every danger imaginable: a heart attack, stroke, robbery, rape, police arrest, my boss seeing me snort of a car hood, making my family cry, ruining lives, death, the comedown and the desire to repeat…The sight of this tall man induced such a drop. My body felt imperiled and soft like a mollusk with no shell. I wanted to collapse into a ball on the ground. Fred’s body, next to mine, felt very far, far away. 

“Maybe, we should go, I mean…who is that guy?” Fred said.

“I don’t think he’s anyone we need to worry about.” The words came from someplace low in my head where lies emerged, in a voice that never seemed like my own. I steered Fred toward the door. His grip on my arm and waist turned calm and reassuring. The man just waited, peering at us. I still wanted to be higher, much higher. I still wanted to feel good. Maybe the tall man sold to Mo, he balanced his weight with an elegance that suggested a condition past the point of good or bad; either having gone too far one direction or the other. His brown satchel might contain the very thing we sought. 

“Hi.” I said to the man as Fred knocked. The man nodded and smiled. He put a finger over his lips to signal silence, opened the satchel and took out a key. What about Mo? What about the little window where we looked down to see her small, old face grimacing at us in disgust or sorrow… Something was off.

Fred, was sometimes a very solid human. I forget to mention details in the heat of the moment. Details are so easy to forget. Like, how you become entangled with a particular person, trust them enough to show them your most animal self, the self you only showed as a baby. I cry a lot with him and for him. I cry like a baby. 

The door opened like an invitation.

“Let’s go, Fred” He looked unsettled. His large eyes were thinking. He had grown wise from life, I thought, he’d let himself grow wise under all that bravado and if I let him think to long he’d want to leave. 

“I don’t think so.” He said. “We should go home.”

Home, home, home. It rang in my ear like a hum that meant very little. Home was here, or there. I had an ache. 

“Oh come on, let’s see what it’s like. I’ve never been past the entryway.” I think perhaps Fred had seen the inside of this place or a place like it, years ago, and didn’t care to revisit. Was he here just to please me? Or was he here like me, drawn by a tug that made every other thought small? I thought of his weaknesses, how he’d hurt me, cheated on me, lied to me, showed me things I couldn’t un-see, made me go mad with love for him and then disappear. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to kill Fred. 

“I want to see.” I told him.

The door opened a crack, and a whoosh of low bone colored light fell on Fred’s face. Not light like a fire or a beach at dawn, but a small, singular light. Enough to see but not to know. And a strange hope redirected me as it always did on the way to get More. Faith in drugs fills me with a sense of infinite protection from the terror of life. This can be like religion. A folly, but I followed it far. Fred looked handsome, handsome and wise and tugged at my clammy hand, saying NO more, no more please but it wasn’t true, he just wanted me to make the decision because his soul had already been sold.

The house was kept warm. Mo wore a thin, pink bathrobe and it was winter. Warmth surprised me. A part of me wanted to hold Fred in my arms and promise him I’d be good and keep him safe, keep me safe, but I couldn’t because all I wanted was More and more. I wanted to feel everything and I wanted to buy everything she had and I wanted to keep going forever and ever until I eclipsed it all and Fred saw me and loved me and moved according to my laws.

I saw a corridor and I saw Fred’s face. You tend to see all the innocent beauty in people the moment you realize you’re killing eachother and can’t stop yourself. I hate making things futile. I believe in brightness, in strong notes, in not harming…It has become less easy to not fuck up. I had Fred’s hand and I tugged it forward with a devilish feeling. I think the devil said, if it turns out fun, if we escape with a story then we can remain an us. Or I wasn’t thinking that Fred had enormous eyes. They were communicating with the atmosphere. They said; I don’t like it here. We shouldn’t be here, I’ve already been here. I pretended not to see. I didn’t know what they said. What could eyes say? 

Mo stayed in the entryway. The man at the door whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear and nodded. There was a sofa and a table with cards in the lobby but the usual baggies weren’t there. No one seemed to notice us. 

“You know where we are? We are inside.” Fred said. 

“Why didn’t she just sell us the stuff and let us go? I mean, tell us to go.”

“I’m not sure she saw us.” 

What did he mean?

Ghosts meant a lot to me. I didn’t know any on a personal level, but I believed in them and respected the idea that they were the true occupants, they came first and stayed. 

“Fred?”

I asked too many questions. We had to find someone who saw us so we could ask for the coke, so we could go back to the apartment and do the coke and not feel this moment. This moment was unbearable. This moment is always unbearable. 

There were drawings on the walls, and pictures. There were mirrors too but I didn’t dare look at our faces. Everything felt too vivid and too graphic, like putting a mirror between my legs for the first time, or passing by a butcher’s shop. I heard whispers and music…or a television buzz, sighs and gasps. This was a home too. Who lived here? I wanted to kill Fred like he had killed me. 

“I told you that this isn’t a place to visit.” Fred said, being the version of a person who held my hand and told me we could have whatever I wanted for dinner. I could tell he was right about this place, this wasn’t feeling like a place to be or a place you could leave without coming to your senses and we had none. 

“Look.” To our left were three women whispering. I couldn’t focus on their clothes or there lips, only the strange murmuring sounds they made. Fred starred at them with the same clouded, vague look he got when he watched porn and I shook him to stop and look at me. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to feel what he had done to me. 

There is always a point in the night when I start wanting more than he can ever want. I begin to feel a truth about him that I can never feel when I am sober; that his power is distorted and misleading. He is always unborn. 

What if someone finds me? Pulls me out of all this? Who would do that? Friends have called me from California, begging me to leave Fred and come back to reality. I hung up on them and told myself that Fred didn’t mind my bunions and Fred understood my madness. My parents warned me gently but their love scared me too and I ran from it back to Fred and his movie scene lifestyle. 

I can’t feel his hand anymore and I am still walking down the hall looking for the thing that will make life bearable. On the floor I see a face. It is beautiful and ancient and hard to take in all at once. Is it my head? An old version of someone? I kneel and put it on like a mask. Fred is gone. He is behind me somewhere with the women, or their reflections in the mirror. The head doesn’t quite fit but there is an earthy smell that I remember, like tea and books and the body of my favorite lover who I’ve never met. I feel more balanced with the old-new mask head, pulled gently onward. I can focus my vision forward, and the head reminds of me of visions that used to ramble around my daydreams: It is round and luminous and it’s nodding me toward a way out and I am standing alone in the daylight and Fred is behind me forever.

Fred is behind me forever. 

(Begun in 2016, and ‘finished’ 2020)