Nocturnalia

I’ve taken well to nighttime. My eyes have forgotten the sting of sunlight, my mind the concrete-eating discomfort of interacting with baristas and bank tellers. At three in the morning, no one asks if I’ve seen any good movies lately, or if I’m planning to go to the grocery store that afternoon. I hold my marbles of despair, each one a velvety mass. I treasure them like a dragon does a mountain of gold.

Occasionally I dig up afterparties and basement shows, sliding through, shadow-like, pressing my lips to the forehead of anyone who buys me a gram. Sometimes I’m a go-go dancer, half-specter, half-naked. When you see me in my panties and virgin skin, it’s only for a second. Then I disappear into the crowd.

Corey and I met at a show. I was letting the music surge through me, the sugar-high treble, the bass like a bludgeoning. It was Jimmy P’s latest, a victory lap for new electronica. The crystalline voice, barely human, set over a jam thick enough to beat you bloody. In the beginning, the dancing was a way to be alone, but I remember the moment it shifted into a way to be with him. In that ocean of sound Corey held up his hand, a lighthouse beneath me. I thought I would fall from the stage, but he had me before I even slipped. I barely felt him over the music but it was enough, demanding and real.

I said stay and he said okay. He curled one hand around the back of my neck and we settled into the circuit that would become my world. He held me in his sweaty arms, against his bare torso that proclaimed there would come no prophet after him—his chest piece said LAST MAN ON EARTH.

Those nights right after the Jimmy P show were the beginnings of my nighttime habit. I still remembered daytime like it was real. The things that happened at night only mattered in the morning, and if morning never came you could live for weeks in the inside-out of the darkness.

I’d been crashing on a girl named Becca’s couch for almost a month and it was time to relocate anyway; she was starting to ask. Corey and I hadn’t been texting, no. It was old-fashioned. I’d written Becca’s number on his arm with a Sharpie the night of the show and two days later he called and asked for me, confessed he couldn’t remember my name. I said V-- and he said Corey. You know, when you dance, you look possessed.

I took a suitcase filled with all my worldly belongings to the address he gave me, a fifth-floor walk-up on Bolton Avenue. There was only one light on in the whole apartment, a shadeless lamp in the living room on a side table. He’d folded the sofa bed out for me in case I didn’t want to sleep with him. It was the clean white sheets that made me want to show him the scars on my thighs, the stretch marks on my hips, the plane of my stomach, my pink insides.

He was like a film star in a t-shirt and jeans, the first person to see every length of my skin uninterrupted. I tried to imagine what I looked like from above. I tried to lose myself in the kissing. I had to be soft. Lovely. Detached. Willing.

I’d planned to leave in the morning. We were going to do mushrooms and that would be that, I’d leave this top-floor unit and roll along to wherever. But sometime in the night I saw needle-small holes in his eyes as he presented me with a bargain: if I just turned my back on daytime, he would watch over me for as long as he was able. Behind the holes shone a bright, warm light. I told him if you say so. He blinked slowly, like a cat.

The rest came easy. It was me and him, plus the hours. The drugs did the work of turning me into a genuine anti-fae moonchild; I’d never done them at home like this. We gobbled up pink, round tablets that wore the Mitsubishi logo, sniffed up snowy powder, downed cocktails of pills whose names meant nothing to me. We stayed in with cartoons on repeat and the lights off, nothing to go by but the TV glow. Mostly we waxed poetic about how much better it was this way, to stay up at night while the world was asleep, to claim darkness as our own kingdom, to revel in the Stygian wasteland. He towered over me like a sentinel or a monument. The safety I found there was its own precious joy, so new to me it felt like a secret. His hands, always hot like mine. Once he washed my hair with strawberry shampoo, silent in his method the whole time. I told him the last things I remember, about running away from home and staying lost in the tangled streets. I told him about the story I had created for myself in my head, of a goddess and an angel who fell in love and got kicked out of Heaven. He said, do you believe in Heaven? I said yeah, sure. Heaven is where you go when you get bored of burning.

You see, the plan was never to survive. What we became—anti-fae—aren’t made to last. We were supposed to evade daytime for a few weeks and then fall asleep, fall out of the world. That night at the show, we became a binary star around our shared disappointment. We both had no friends and no jobs, little money, a little rage.

We didn’t talk about this. Sometimes you look at someone—you’re in the last few weeks of your life—and you realize, relieved, that you can cease to exist together. It makes the whole thing kind of fun. You think you’re going to go with a swift, smooth dive into silence. (There will be no music playing.) You think it’ll be a cool goodbye. And, best of all, you know you’re right; awaiting death is a spiritually heightened state of being. Like being in a club.

I believed him when he told me he loved me. There was no reason to doubt it. We were in the end days, forsaking the City and all its leeches and bright places. As the only anti-fae in existence, we might as well spin love out of straw, lay it over one another like a blanket.

Corey went out one night, didn’t say where he was going. He drove fast and true into a streetlamp. We don’t know if it was suicide but his body was mangled beyond recognition, the car just a heap of hot metal. They said he died instantly, but how can they ever know something like that for sure?

I’m in Corey’s apartment, in the living room with the lights off. Through the window, I watch the gloomy parts of the vacant lot across the street. It’s filled with debris; the City has summoned me here with nothing but a tire iron and a fire pit. I imagine what this place might tell me if it could speak. I will find you in the dark. I will pick you out like a bug in my hair. I will find you nocturnal.

It’s almost high noon of the night, three a.m. with no twinkle-stars. V-- has exited the building. I stand out on Bolton Avenue, AKA the carotid artery of the City. I walk south, toward Hellvale, AKA its heart.

Club K-Hole crowns this neighborhood like a jewel, but only if you know where to look. It’s one of the City’s last secrets. The door blends into a building, slate on slate. No security at this joint. I let myself in and bounce down the familiar stairs into the concrete room. Tall, brutish tables to one side, a dance floor in the back where people move against one another in the fog. I wade into the crowd, peering back and forth, trying to catch the only eye I ever found familiar. This is the place, and I’m right on time.  

The music melts into that Jimmy P track. It starts with a girl giggling. My heart lurches. I spy Corey a moment later, behind a cluster of dancers wearing fluttering gauze. Yes. He doesn’t smile, just perks up a little like he always did. I catch him on the outskirts of the floor just as the strobes get going, and it’s too loud to speak, so he gestures for me to follow. The synth is a little universe around us. I reach for his arm, can’t quite catch it. We almost lose each other as he makes his way off to one side and pulls open a door I’d never noticed before and we’re free, broken off from the music, in what I figure is a back stairwell. I’m breathing hard, trying to get a good look at him, but I can’t make him out in the dark. 

“Found you, white rabbit,” I say.

“Knew you would,” he says. His voice comes from the densest part of the shadow in front of me. “Sorry about the crash, V--. Hated to leave you like that but I went to get some licorice and the only place that had any was across town.”

“That’s what you couldn’t tell me you were doing?”

He blinks, slowly again.

“You said you wanted it.”

I’m so warm when I’m with him.

“What a way to go,” I say, reaching for him. He lets out a pained breath.

“That’s the thing, uh. You know. You can’t touch me here,” he says. “I have to go back, V--. And you gotta come with. You have to die now, too.”

What’s harder than death? The monotony of the day. The monotony of the night. The loneliness creeping into my clothes like the cold. Knowing someone gave birth to me and not knowing where. I’ve been the anti-fae queen for weeks—no one is searching for me and no one remembers my true name. Whatever I might have become has slipped through my fingers.

But do you really want to go?

I’m sick of feeling sick, sick of waking up in his empty apartment. The nights are getting longer. Daytime is alien. I see it on TV and that’s as much of it as I’m brave enough to face. Only a few things carry over from daytime to nighttime: apotheosis, desperation, vast bodies of water. These are all more or less the same.

I tell him, “I’ll think about it.”

He says, “We don’t have time.”

“I’ll make time.”

Back in the glow, Corey is mysteriously gone. I’m flailing on the dance floor with a bright-eyed girl who moves like she knows the track. Black hair that waves all the way to her hips, a sequined dress, a laughing look. All joy, no fear—her body, huge and controlled, has authority here. A locket shaped like a sickle around her neck keeps catching the light. This stranger and I put on shows for one another, shouting along with the apocalyptic waves of music. I’m a witch, teasing with the hem of my skirt, cosmic in her neon aura.

Some anonymous white powder courses through me, altering my insides. I’m bearing a great weight. I am made of radioactive material. I don’t feel my body move until moments after it moves. The girl kisses me in an expression of pure glee and I kiss back. Her hair catches on her bracelet for a second and then untangles itself, drifting slowly down.

I’m thinking about love. How pure, how clean. Down and dirty. The whole day and the whole night, that’s what love is. The midday sun. The lavender-clouded twilight. The hot evening. The rushing tick of each small hour. The first, thin light of morning.

There comes a moment when it feels natural to take a break. We’re slick with sweat, getting worn out. We pull each other to a door to the right of the dance floor, out the exit, up the stairs, into the alley. I’m laughing the whole time. Corey is in the background, somewhere behind me, though if I turn to look I know he’ll disappear.

“What a time, huh?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I missed that.”

“I heard you wanted to die.” Her smile, suddenly like a knife.

“I do,” I say very seriously. “How’d you know? Got someone waiting for me.”

“But I’ve been waiting for you, too,” she says. “I’ve waited for you my whole life. You die, I won’t have shit to wait for anymore.”

Headlights slide past, slow and even. Her eyes glimmer like an animal’s.

“Who are you?” I say.

“I’m Alua, the princess of pop. Professional sex symbol.” She tosses her hair. “I’m your guardian angel, V--.” Her teeth are too sharp. She’s more like a sculpture than a person.

She pulls two little baggies out of her bra, one circular pill in each one. Each one bears a symbol: the Mazda logo, the Playboy bunny.

“You’re giving me X to make me wanna live?” I say.

“I’m showing you a good time,” she says.

I take the pill, never looking away from her eyes. She does the same. Metal on my tongue and I don’t even gag, like a real badass.

“Great. Let’s go to my house,” she says. “You’ll have fun there.”

Alua lives in the Lower City, down by the museums and opera halls. She orders a car and we get in. The X starts to hit right as we arrive at the corner of Valentine and Fawkes, where her apartment is smooshed between a deli and a little electronics store. I’m usually grateful to experience the morose glory of the night, but tonight I’m excited. Mommy Nyx. Blanket of the world. Alua keys in the code on one side of the door. We climb up a staircase.

I hear myself giggling in the narrow stairwell and the sound itself makes me laugh more. Our skin flashes gold in the dizzying light. Her apartment is called 3B. She puts the key in the lock like it’s a science and I see traces every time she moves. I want to run my hands along her forearms and feel the thick hair there, really feel it, get my fingers into the follicles and experience each strand like it might tell me a secret. 

Inside: cacophony we couldn’t hear in the hall. Voices all around, the music a glitchy, grungy wreck that rips through the room. I press in behind Alua, who batters into the crowd so naturally. She hangs her keys on a hook by the door. She leads, pushing people aside to make room for little old me.

It looks like a normal apartment, aside from all the people milling around. Coffee maker, dishwasher, TV, velvet blackout curtains in the living room. We wriggle our way into the hallway.

The light in her room is blue. The bedspread is blue. The walls are either blue or cast in a blue light. It’s like a spaceship. She removes her jacket and tosses it onto a desk chair. The whole place is cramped. I like watching how she commands a space, especially her own.   

“Are you really a sex symbol?” I say.

“For sure. I have a fan page,” she says with a wave. She sits on her bed. “Come here.”

I take a seat next to her and she leans over to her nightstand, pulls a baggie of ground up weed, a little pipe, and a bright blue lighter out of the drawer.

“What happens to anti-fae when they die?” I say.

“Good Q, V--. God scrapes their souls on His cheese-grater until they’re in teeny little pieces, and then He picks out the shiniest parts and mashes those back up into a person-shaped thing, and then He kicks the thing back to Earth. The anti-fae go back to what they know. But they can’t touch anyone, so it’s hard. Have you ever lived without touching anyone? No contact at all? No hugs, no sex, no casual touches, no handshakes, no fingers brushed? You ever love someone to death and then you can’t even pat them on the shoulder when they cry?” 

“I could go a long time like that,” I say.

“But you know why it’s hard, with Corey. You guys were fucking,” she says.

“He wants me to die so he can fuck me again?” I say.

“It’s not so crazy,” she says. “People say everything though touch. It’s why I became a sex symbol. When you touch someone, what you’re saying is, ‘you know, you’re not actually the only one.’ Also, like, whatever else you mean.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. 

I lay back on the bed. The tiny bowl is already cashed. Alua puts it on the nightstand and then lays back too, and when she meets my eyes it’s hilarious. The room is warm enough to be amniotic. I feel moonlight inside me while we laugh, shining out of my pores, obscuring me in all the blue. I am secretly at the bottom of an ocean. The muffled music seeping in through the walls is full of baroque grandeur. I see the ceiling but I don’t really see it. There something else over there, old and still living.

Are you awake? I need to know I’m not the only one. I’m not trying to write a love story. I’m just trying to remember. I miss him. He only needed things I already have. Maybe it’s too simple, staying up at night. I never tire. Don’t you think things are a little altered? Isn’t everything higher, but softer, too? Isn’t it easier to fall in love? When you don’t have to really look at a person?

But I looked at Corey. I really did, I think.  

Next sundown. He hovers above me. I can’t feel his breath. His eyes are glossy, with those pinpricks again. He opens his mouth to breathe me in and I try to rise up to meet him, to cross into his emptiness. I close my eyes to take that blackness which brings me such peace.

But then it’s Alua there instead, and I can feel the heat coming off her.

“Good evening, mooooonshine,” she sings.

She has a tab of acid on one fingertip. I open my mouth. She drops it on my tongue.

The street is cavernous. I feel very small next to the buildings here. Leaves stick to the sidewalk. When I look at them too long, they multiply into fractals, one after the other, amaranthine. I bend down and try to scrape up a fractal-leaf with my nail but nothing comes up.

I haven’t tripped properly in a while. Corey and I never did those shrooms. Thanks, Alua. She climbs on a bike rack like a wild animal.

“Hey,” says Corey.

I look up. He’s standing in front of me, hands in his pockets, looking a little translucent.

“I miss you,” he says.

“I miss you too.” The words are heavy on my tongue, like they don’t want to meet someone who left me here.

“Are you coming with?” he says. He looks so hopeful, so humble, not quite there. I wonder what he sees through those perforated eyes. “We’re running out of time.”

“In a little while. I just wanna ride out this thing with Alua first,” I say.

“Is she replacing me?” he says.

“No, it’s not like that,” I say. I pick at another fractal, but it’s not real either. “She’s just here, you know?”

The sounds of the city are disguised as music in the distance. Engines accelerate into strums on an electric guitar. Their horns become fabled trumpets. Recycling dumped into a truck sounds like the rainfall of a piano. I envision the cells in my stomach; they’re trying to keep me alive. I collapse in a patch of grass and watch the slivers of sky between buildings, which are forever a wash of deep purple without a single star. The music grows louder, a symphony swelling, crashing like waves in the streets.

I lay on the grass and let it soak me up slowly. I can feel the blades grasping for my skin, reaching for me with their small hands. The cells in my stomach. The cells in my arms and legs, the frenetic cells in my brain. Are they trying to keep me alive or themselves? I run a hand along my cold belly. The fractals shift above me, invite me into the chemical geometry that is this wild place. Maybe I’m already disparate pieces forced into something girl-shaped, and I cling to nighttime like a zygote to the womb.

“What are you doing?” says Alua.

“Riding it out,” I say.

“I’ll join you.”

She lays down next to me in the grass, slick pleather skirt harsh against the ground. Her hair pools around her.

“Sometimes I think this is the only place in the world,” she says.

“Same,” I say. “I’ve never left.”

“You have to get out sometime, V--. It’s eating you alive.”

“Nah. I belong to it.”

“You think so?”

The trip is a gasping grind, a lingering grief. I spin, or I don’t, but it feels like I do. I want to devour the grass like a bovine creature. I seep into the earth and become part of its magmatic mantle. And even as I escape myself, I take my diamond kernel of isolation with me. I want to know where I came from. If I could dissolve this impenetrable gem, I might not look back.

But on the other hand: the cloying bliss of unending life. Its own limitless childhood. If I could immortalize myself in the nighttime, I could be like Corey. I could be with him.

The maw of darkness yawns to my left, where the sidewalk used to be. I face the Vantablack expanse, reach an arm out toward it. It’s silk beneath my fingers. I could have three faces for this night—its ward, bride, and mother. Dea noctis. I’ll cherish it, pull it around me like a rabbit fur coat. Corey will run his hands up and down my new body. My death, wearing the clothes of freedom, will transcend its tragedy.

I barely know where I’ll be sleeping each night, let alone what I want to be when I grow up. That’s what they always ask you, isn’t it? Where are you going in life? What do you have planned? I’m five-foot-two, I eat acid for breakfast, and sometimes the scars inside me split open. I feel them now, leaking pus that will swallow all these cells that are so desperate to persist.

The sky remains empty. I feel sick. I try to focus on the grass as it whispers the same word over and over again, though it sounds like a different word each time. Hungry. Roaming. Inverted. Just like how love is a body of water, these things are all the same. The grass knows. I bet I knew it first, long ago.

But I’m anti-fae now. I exhale carbon monoxide. I will kill you if you touch me. Only Corey can bear it. When exactly did my heart break? When he left? Sometime before?

The shadow whispers. Come on, now. You’re the last remaining star.  

The City pauses between breaths. It holds me in its empty lungs. I shiver. 

“Hey, V--,” says Alua. She says my name like I’m gentle, but I’m not. I’m just lost. Alien eyes massive and cool, she’s serene. She casts her usual glow. Her hand finds mine. You are here, on planet Earth, lying in the grass. Just me and my guardian angel, the princess of pop. “Do you think you could choose me?” she goes on. “Or was I too late?”

No sadness here. She’s just asking.

“You were pretty late, to be honest,” I tell her.

“I never thought you were going to die before,” she says.

“What happens to you if I do, Alua?” I ask.

“What happened to you when Corey died?” she says. “What happened to you when daylight died, when the things that gave you purpose were torn from your hands?”

“I let them go. Or I waited for them to come back.”

“Not what you did. What happened to you.”

She is as big as a satellite, filling my vision. I brush my fingers against her lips and they close against me. She pulls my hand from her mouth with a sad little smile.

I’m about to reach for her again when a sheet of ink douses the world. The sky goes scarlet. Suddenly it’s Corey all around me and a buzz blares in my ears. I scream but I can’t hear it.

“You said she wasn’t replacing me.”

Everything flashes silver once—a cold, irate blindness. I’m sweating. I’m freezing.

“Please stop,” I say. My full voice loses traction in my throat. “Seriously, just stop.”

“Not until you come with!”

“You’re freaking me out,” I try to tell him.

“Don’t make me go alone, V--,” he says. “It’s gonna be soon. Don’t make me do it alone.”

What happened to me?

“I have to,” I choke out.

He’s dimmer, then.

“You really doing this?” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. The darkness to my left starts roiling. “I can’t. I’m the last star in this city.” I’m blinking away tears. His wet mouth is open. His hair starts to leak color, dripping ink on my face, and of course I can’t feel it.

“You’re sending me away.”

He is so still as he realizes.

The darkness laps over us, icy. Alua’s hand finds mine again.

Corey is perfectly colorless when it clears, just an outline drawn in white against the sky. I have the strange sensation that we have completed a final revolution. The shadow lashes again, and this time his body falls to my side in a heap.

“Yes, I’m sending you away,” I say. He looks at me, almost devoid of his strange second life. All the way here, at the very end, and I still need to run my hand along the side of his neck.  

“But you said stay.”

“You did, Corey. You stayed.”

A thousand shadowy arms reach out of the void and curl around him, rolling him away. Whomever they belong to lets out a shriek, and then I’m bathed in silence. I listen like he might come back, and then he doesn’t.

After a while, Alua speaks.

“Almost daybreak, V--.”

“I know.”

The sky has been lightening for hours. Shades of indigo, then cerulean.

“Do you want to go inside?”

I’m thinking about love again. Love is a pit. It’s begging and then a sacrifice. It’s the sting in my eye. It’s the fresh cut left by the first thread of dawn glinting off glass buildings. I lie very still beneath its heat. I don’t burn. I barely quiver.