7 Days, 7 Nights
By: Tammy
Summary: Rambles over 7 days.
General Hospital inspired | 1980 Olympics | Craig Johnson - 10 sentences | Neal Broten | Olympics cont. | Fish/Roddick | A-Rod/Hank | Hank/A-Rod | Edmonton | Brush off | Addiction
A staccato beats against my breast--not my own, but another’s. Lying, curled up in white starched sheets, and thinking and staring at the ceiling--a ceiling that is not my own. But there is no one next to me, there is no chest pressed against my own though there be a slight throbbing and pressure down the middle of my chest. The heart that beats and thuds is not my own, and feels foreign in my body. There is an aching wish that my body will reject it; will that rule her death in vain? Did she die so I could live, or was it a petty and dangerous thing called ‘luck’? Coincidence. Chance.
She is dead and I lay here surrounded by machines that tell me that I am alive and that she is dead, and that the heart within my chest is not my own. Will the life I lead be my own? Or is it hers continued? I feel slightly less than human. Not a thief, but a machine. Her heart, after all, was just a machine, just an organ that provides a function, and pumps blood through my body. All muscle and cells--did it ever feel, ever yearn, ever hope, ever love?
Will I reject her heart or will it reject me?
Is this really a second chance at living? Living with somebody else’s heart, somebody else’s life. I am on borrowed time. I am borrowing her time.
I am stealing her time. Her family aches with the loss. There is a hole in them bigger than in her empty chest. They cry because they have lost her. They cry because they can no longer hold her. They cry because they will never speak to her again. They cry because the loss is too great and they miss her. They cry for themselves. They do not cry for all of her losses. They do no cry because she will never have children or grow old or fall in love. Not yet, anyway.
They cry.
I cry too. Because I am happy she is dead.
How long will I have to live with that thought?
-- 8/13/03
“Yur his fav’rite.”
“Shut up.”
“Yo-awr his faave-rite.”
“Shut up.”
“Yo--” A pillow thumped against his head.
“Say that again and I’ll hit you.”
“You already did,” he grinned, throwing the pillow back. “Fav’rite.”
“I’m gonna pound you,” Mark jumped on him, punching his arm.
He laughed, putting his arm up to protect himself. Mark stopped, lying down beside him, and then punched him once more for good measure. “Really, Mawk. You are.”
“I am not.”
“Then why doesn’t he yell atchoo? He always yells at me. He yells at everybody on the team except maybe Jimmy.”
“Because I do what he tells me to do the first time.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. So shut up.”
“Goodnight, Mawk.”
“Night.”
-- 8/13/03
“I’m gonna get my life together and then you’re gonna see how good I can play,” he had promised before walking down the darkened tunnel and out into the expansive lobby and eventually into the snowy night. Snowflakes fell with a steady pace, licking and kissing his face, and itching a bit so he brushed a few away with his mittened fist, but the stiff wool only scratched more, seemingly leaving more itchy hairs behind. He had promised, and he would, but not tonight and he hailed for a taxi, leaving his car far behind in the parking lot. He stopped the taxi when he felt like he had reached a nice spot. It was. Too nice, and he left the barstool soon enough and ambled down the sidewalk, avoiding cracks lest he break his mother’s back, until he spotted neon lights that beckoned him inside to buy a heavy bottle sans brown paper bag for the moment. The cashier rang him up and a flicker of recognition graced his face before it was brushed away with a scoff and a “no way.” No way was right, he thought, because America’s son didn’t buy booze in dirty liquor stores with bars on the windows and homeless men dozing silently outside with their palms out and open and facing the sky waiting for some divine gift from above, from the sky, from a lonely passerby with loose change in his pocket. He walked some more, looking for a bench or maybe a park, but he found none and leaned against a tree which was protected by bars too, and he stared down the neck of the bottle at the liquid he hoped would transform him into some kind of quasi-transcendentalist, taking him away from the guilt and the pain, and his broken body. It didn’t; only reflecting back a boy draped in an American flag, searching for his father, and counting rows, unaware years later that he’d lose himself, not an old man in the stands.
-- 8/14/03
The anthem is a distant memory. Its sweet lilts and the sounds of the crowd blending beautifully, and I tried to commit it all to memory, but must have forgotten, too caught up in the moment. I have a slight recollection of smaller things from that night, that ceremony. A hand on the small of my back, the texture of those ridiculous blue sweat suits, and the taste in my mouth: anticipation and joy. The rest is washed away--a blur. I have to watch videos to try and remember everything. Then it all clicks and comes rushing back. Mike and the platform, the hand, and rushing forward, jumping with fists in the air leads to the partying, raucous voices, and the liquor along with John’s girlfriend maneuvers my mind to warm breaths against my neck and hotel sheets beneath my fingertips.
It all begins, however, with the music. That first sound. The instruments and that first note as the flags were raised.
The song of a siren and bathing me with it until I’m completely surrounded and drowning. Sweet and cool, and pouring into my mouth or maybe even out. Bubbling over and choking, coughing, forcing it back up with breaths deep inside my lungs. Not wanting it within me, this song of hers, and this curse of hers. However, all sirens are enchanting and no pirate, no man knew until too late. Until he was already caught or trapped, or being eaten alive.
So I probably drank it, drowning myself willingly. Perhaps I chugged it like I did with so many beers that night.
We hadn’t known what we had done until later when the media swarmed us. The implications sunk in, and it was a good thing we hadn’t known. Herbies are hard, but no drill is as intense as that kind of pressure. So we didn’t rise above because of it, we rose above in spite of it.
Famous is just a word when you’re a college boy playing for your country. It becomes something else after you defeat communism with a stick blade and win a gold medal. It twists and turns, and transforms itself for each individual--striking some but not others, and never with an explanation as to why. It brings attention and bright lights and people. Above all, people. People who want to give you money, people who want to take your money, people who want a piece of you, people who need, people who crave that thing which has crawled up inside you and seemingly set you apart from ordinary, people who want to help you, hurt you, buy you, fuck you, love you.
It is the curse of the siren and it began that night with that first note sinking deep within us and settling somewhere in our stomachs. The siren lures men with her song, but was it always her song that lured them? There is the conundrum; she never knows if the love is true or if it was just her voice.
Perhaps that’s why she tore at them with her claws and ate them alive with her razor sharp teeth.
-- 8/16/03
He leaned forward, pressing his lips against his neck. He inhaled, then pulled back, staring. He sighed, learning forward again and pressing his lips against the side of his face, reaching up slowly with his hands for the buttons on his shirt.
“Don’t,” Neal said.
He raised an eyebrow, not pulling away, but no longer fiddling with the white plastic button.
“I don’t want a pity fuck.”
He smiled. He kissed his brow, shaking his head slightly, and pulled at the buttons on the shirt until they gave way.
Neal grabbed his wrists suddenly. He gripped them tightly, warmth and pressure surrounding his wrist, and he could feel the blood pulse through his grasp trying to reach his fingers.
“It’s not a pity fuck,” he said. “We won. Remember?”
Neal let go. “Did we?” And he could smell the beer on his breath. He could practically taste it as Neil breathed out in shorter gasps and into his mouth.
“Gold medal. Ceremony. Remember?” He smiled in amusement at Neal’s consternation and he fiddled with more buttons and cotton rustled and slid its way off his body.
“Of course.” The grip returned on his wrist. “No pity fucks,” he said again.
“This isn’t--” He jerked his hand back. He rolled his eyes, and scowled. This was difficult and taking too long, and why did he go home with the boy who wanted him to rub his arm and walk him through it? “We won,” he stressed.
“I know.”
“This isn’t a pity fuck.”
And then to his surprise Neal kissed him.
-- 8/17/03
The silver was cool against his lips, and he parted them, running his tongue against the metal. He kissed the skin next to it, softer and smoother along his inner wrist than the calloused palms. Mardy’s fingers ran through his hair, scratching his scalp. He closed his eyes and Mardy tried to motion him upwards to meet him, but he smirked, flicking his hands aside and burrowing his knees and shins deeper into the thick carpet.
“Just making up for that serve earlier.”
Mardy grinned, teeth gleaming white in the nearly dark room. “I was pretty sure Cliff said that I had the better hands.”
Yeah, but I won, was at the tip of his tongue, but he smiled instead and stood up, pushing Mardy backwards and then lying down beside him on the bed. He lay like that for a while, side by side, and staring until Mardy spoke up.
“Are we going to do anything? Or did you invite me up here to look at the view?”
“The view.” He stuck out his tongue.
“You’re such a loser.” Mardy ran his hand over his face and against his cheek several times.
He reached out, feeling Mardy’s stubble. He let his thumb trace his lower lip, then the cleft of his chin and down his neck and chest.
“Is your mom downstairs?”
“Yeah.” He traced his stomach and the ridges of his hipbones.
“Are you guys going out for dinner?”
“Probably.”
“I miss your mom’s chicken.”
“I miss you too.”
-- 8/17/03
The television left an eerie bluish glow to his face, and Alex likened him to an alien. A foreign object in his room, and Alex studied him, running his eyes over him and wondering.
“The Hammer,” his voice said and then the noise seemed to spill over and he was watching himself in Hank’s eyes. Hank breathed in and his chest rose and the cup resting precariously on his stomach rose and dipped as well, swaying in the ocean, not on top of stomach muscles.
“Look, it’s me,” Hank said. “No longer the A-Rod show.” He smiled to himself and Alex watched him, watched the grin slowly fall from his face.
Alex glanced over at the television screen, watching as he rubbed his hands over Hank’s face months ago. His belly was warm and he reached over, removing the cup from Hank’s stomach and putting it on the end table. “Let’s not watch tv.” He turned it off with the remote. “Let’s do it,” he said bluntly and Hank stared at him, eyes wide and annoyed.
“Sportcenter’s next.”
“Who cares? It’ll run again in an hour. C’mon let’s do it.”
“You sound like a fifteen year old.” Alex nudged him. He sighed as Alex tugged at his boxers. “Fine, but keep the tv on.”
Alex frowned but gave a kind of nod and that’s all that was needed as he finished tugging at his underwear and Hank flipped the television back on.
He pressed his body against Hank’s and kissed his neck as Hank craned around his head to watch the screen. He jerked the two of them off simultaneously and shuddered against Hank’s ribcage, feeling his expand as Hank inhaled, and they fit perfectly, and Hank’s breath hitched as the anchors reflected in his eyes.
Alex kissed him and rolled off; Hank reached for his cup of water. They watched Sportcenter and then crawled under the covers. They turned off the lights, but Hank kept the television on, volume low so that it was just a low hum. Alex fell asleep and Hank reached for him, curling his body against Alex’s and wrapping his arm around his midsection.
--8/19/03
It doesn’t matter, Alex had said about the money. But it did matter; it mattered to Hank. It mattered to Hank when Alex always paid for things because he could afford it. It mattered to Hank when reporters or fans talked about the team and they invariably brought up Tom and the deal. It mattered to Hank when they lost another game. It mattered to Hank when they slept side by side and Hank was sizing him up, cutting him up in his mind. He saw little dotted lines across Alex’s body, separating body parts: his right leg was worth 10 million, his left wrist 350,000, and his left foot a cool two million dollars. Alex pressed against him, kissing him and sliding his tongue into his mouth, and it tasted like dirty and soggy dollar bills. He felt like he was a little kid, and beneath Alex, and he really was and he bit his lip as he came, not saying a word. Alex whispered that he loved him, and Hank felt slightly bad for his earlier thoughts and imaginings, but that didn’t stop him from hearing pennies clink against the bottom of the piggy bank in his head.
-- 8/19/03
His mother crochets.
You know that movie with Christina Applegate and the babysitter? Kenny tells his mom that the old woman is crocheting a massive doily for the living room couch. It was slightly funny, and extremely hysterical if you were high at the time. We promised each other that the next time we were out shopping for yarn we’d pick up some nice needles as well and crochet ourselves a massive doily for our couches.
We never found ourselves in a fabric or yarn store, and so our couches have remained bare.
When we saw Shawn’s couches we died. We fell to the ground, clutching our stomachs and begging for air.
We weren’t even high.
We wanted there to be quilts on his bed and stuffed animals, and maybe scary dolls on shelves and plastic on ugly recliners. But Shawn’s mother only crochets; she doesn’t give her son scary porcelain dolls with eyes that blink with real eyelashes and plot your death while you sleep.
He scowled and yelled at first, and then he tried, poorly, to laugh along with us as if it didn’t bother him. We all knew it did, but we weren’t about to stop laughing. He could have thrown the entire crocheted mess into the closet or burned it, but he didn’t. He just sat uncomfortably while we traded jokes at his expense. He never stood up for his mother, or his doily; he never made excuses or justifications for why it was on his couch.
It just was.
We ate cold pizza and drank warm beers, and watched scrambled porn on his television. Scrambled porn had become a staple in out diet and even though we could afford the unscrambled kind, it was tradition, and we didn’t really mind either way. We sat on the couch, red faced and embarrassed and making excuses for our erections when we’d discovered we’d been watching scrambled gay porn for months. We blamed it on the crocheted doily. We switched from Sam Adams to Labatt Blue when Mike complained that we weren’t being Canadian enough. His logic made no sense, but we won five games in a row after the switch so we drank Labatts from that day on.
We wore cheap green visors we’d stolen from the fireworks festival two years before when we played poker, and after Mike broke his thumb we challenged him to thumb wars nightly. He screamed like a girl when I pinned his thumb up against the couch after the no-mercy rule had been put into play. We watched as the anchors announced trades at the deadline, and sighed with relief that none of our names had been said until Janne called Eric from his cell phone. He sat on the couch like a statue until he hung up and then leaned his head against the crocheted arm. Nobody made a joke about that until weeks later when Eric said, “trades happen,” like Forrest Gump, but nobody wanted to have that printed on a bumper sticker, so we made fun of the couch instead.
Shawn kicked the couch after we lost to Dallas and I slept on it that night. Mike laid passed out next to it on the ground. We were all relieved the next morning when despite sleeping in a pool of his own vomit, he had managed not to drown. We wanted to use the doily to clean up the mess but Shawn lunged at us, hitting me and leaving a bruise on my arm. He went into the kitchen to make breakfast and I drew the short straw and followed him in.
“Cornflakes or cheerios?” he says now, and I nod at the yellow box.
You flipped out, I say inside my head. You hit me.
“Over a fucking doily,” I say out loud accidentally.
“Leave my couch the fuck alone.” He crunches the cereal between his teeth and I mentally cringe because I know he’s grinding his teeth together.
“You’re eating my cereal.” He pushes the bowl across the table and it slides before catching the partition in the middle and toppling over, spilling.
We call for Mike and make him clean up the mess as punishment for being so disgusting. We sit on the couch later, and Shawn, having not slept the night before, falls asleep easily as we watch Letterman.
-- 8/19/03
He was quite certain it was the worst possible way to be rejected. He found himself wishing for yelling, hitting, or disgust. Why hadn’t John yelled at him? Called him a fag? Spat in his face? He even found himself wishing for the brush-off. Something careless-- “oh, you’re here?” Because that translated to, “oh, your feelings matter?”, “oh, you matter?” That at least meant John was an arrogant asshole who didn’t care about him or his feelings.
But John wasn’t an arrogant asshole. He certainly wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if John was. John was perfect in that imperfect way, which really meant that he left his dirty socks all over the place, had no table manners, but owned the cutest golden retriever puppy on the planet, knew how to make a great cup of coffee, and was perfect for him.
John was perfect which was why even his rejections were perfect; he was polite, yet firm, and patting him on the back in such a way that there was no room for even the slightest bit of righteous anger. No room for accusations of homophobia or even just being a jerk about having to deal with the situation, with his feelings. John wasn’t rude or nasty; if anything, John was more John than he’d ever been in his entire life and that made him only want John more.
That left him, unfortunately, in the awful predicament where he didn’t have that righteous anger. He had, instead, John pulling his hand away, leaving it close enough to touch, but knowing that he couldn’t, and that feeling in his stomach and his bones and his entire body where all he wanted to do was cry.
But he couldn’t, because John smiled at him and asked if everything was “cool between the two of us?” So John wasn’t completely infallible and he was incapable of realizing that things weren’t cool between the two of them and probably would never be ever again, but John had the best of intentions, so he couldn’t even get mad at him for that.
He turned on the television and watched the Little League World Series and wished he was twelve again.
- 8/20/03
She’d never had an addiction before. Chocolate and boys didn’t count because if she really wanted to, she could force herself not to eat or force herself not to care.
But now she had one and she couldn’t get rid of it. Which really was the essence of an addiction, but it didn’t matter because she wanted it gone--she wanted this feeling gone: this drive and desire and this incessant wanting and needing.
How did it happen so quickly? How had it gone from glances to looking to staring to brushes to touching, and nothing to liking to yearning to coveting to craving to this primal needing? The progression itself was fascinating, and she’d love to analyze it, but the point of the addiction was that she couldn’t focus on anything else. It had consumed her life and what she wanted more than anything was to satiate it, but that would mean--
She’d have to kiss Sara.
-- 8/20/03