Victoria Victoria

I dated Victoria Victoria for four months before she took her own life by swallowing a bottle of pills of some sort the coroner never disclosed. It doesn’t matter what kind of pills they were, I don’t guess. They may have been rat poison because she once threatened to kill herself with rat poison and promised me she would bleed out of her eyes and ears in such a way that it sounded as though she glorified the idea like some girls glorify an afternoon at a spa. But that was when she was drunk and so much of what she said or did that was extraordinary happened when she was drunk. 

I sat on the porch swing where we used to sit and I swayed back and forth; the chains creaked the way they do, but they sounded differently than they did with Victoria Victoria. I watched the bats zip and crisscross the streetlight and cars pass on the blue street with their headlights glaring indifferent to her absence. I watched the spiders she feared make webs to trap and kill insects. Occasionally, some drunk from the pub would stumble past on the sidewalk and trip on the crack I have long meant to fix. Maybe I purposefully don’t fix it because I find humor in people tripping and falling or because I like things the way they are.

I sat there as though she would come at any moment, like her car would barrel down the street and turn the wrong way down the one-way alley and do a U-turn to park with the radio blaring some awful song. But she wasn’t coming. I texted her phone as though she could read it and it was delivered but not read. I called to hear her voice and unsatisfied I left her a voicemail she would never hear. Things I forgot to say or wanted to say but simply didn’t. Her phone rang because her cellphone battery had yet to die. Her phone was probably in her room at her parent’s house or in her car. But she was in the morgue and laying on a slab of cold metal, naked and alone. I felt badly for her because she was by herself, I think. She never wanted to be by herself. She finally did it, I thought glumly slapping a mosquito dead on my arm. She bought herself a one way ticket to eternal bliss. I was drunk on a bottle of brandy that had set in my cabinet for two years until this occasion.

To put it simply, we had a fretful relationship due to her rampant depression that she treated with alcohol, which only made things predictably worse. The initial good feelings of her buzz wore off quickly and what remained, always, was a beleaguered but remarkably beautiful girl who would never realize her potential to be wonderful, who would forget all about the sweet girl she was when she was sober. A Jeckyl and Hyde. The happy-go-lucky tipsy girl morphed into a monstrous incantation of her better self, and disaster of some sort always ensued. I suppose I could look at it more favorably and say with some resolution that she was with me because of every good and bad thing that ever happened to her, every flaw, however terrible. Of every broken relationship or happy one, every Humbert Humbert, we were the sum. 

She was a beautiful woman who looked like an old-time movie actress, a bombshell who might be painted on a WWII bomber plane or a pin-up girl in one of those GI magazines. But she was not a trollop, I felt when we met; and she was humbled in a simple country-girl-way with a colloquial tongue that I adored. She didn’t try to be anything more than that she was like so many people I knew before her and I admired her for her sincerity and frankness; her plainness despite her amativeness. It was the most passionate relationship I ever knew, possibly because I was so enamored by her vulnerable beauty. She was lost and injured. She was the bird I never fixed when I was ten whose wing I accidentally broke with an errant pass. She was the baby bunnies I ran over with the lawnmower hidden in the tall grass.

Victoria Victoria. So nice her mother named her twice, she joked. She said a hundred sleazy men had made the same joke and she smiled recalling it, which confused me because the words of sleazy men hardly seemed to be anything to smile about. But our physical bond consumed us both and hardly a night passed that she wasn’t here and we didn’t end up in bed together doing things over and over that I haven’t the insensitivity to put to words in what may serve as a eulogy if I am so called upon. Those tender things which eased our minds and bodies to the point of utter exhaustion and to the tranquility of genuine satisfaction for us both, having found in each other the euphoria of pure lubricity. 

We simply fit and it was as though every movement was choreographed by some renowned pornographic film director who stood invisibly in the corner of the room and thought commands that we achieved before he articulated them. There was no melancholy or staleness in our lovemaking and I’ve never known anyone more passionate about it, or me in that way, so possessed to please and to serve; and such was mutual and eagerly reciprocated and her climaxes were never singular but consecutive bursts of euphoria. Oh, Victoria Victoria! What a spell you cast upon me. And when at last I felt she was acceptably fatigued, I let go and she writhed under me and moaned softly and glazed I slipped out and rested atop her until our sore bodies dried.

But she often came over stumbling like those drunks from the pub that tripped on the sidewalk, or high with glassy eyes and a vacant stare, and it was difficult to connect to that person who seemed foreign to me, much different from the woman I fell in love with so simply. She was trying to kill something in her that couldn’t be killed. Hardly a day passed that she didn’t say she was going to end her life in some way, but when I spoke of the root she would storm away or draw silent as a porcelain doll until I stopped asking. And when the subject was left alone for a while and dissipated, she would regroup into her old self until she blew up again about something else, something seemingly so unimportant and remedial that it perplexed me to think as to how could it possibly enrage her. I knew there was nothing I could do to prevent her unhappiness, her upheavals, but I made a sincere effort to fix her, though in so doing I only drove her further away from me until she was completely gone. 

Sometimes she said that sex was all she had to offer, or contrariwise, she indicted me by claiming sex is all I wanted of her. She often accused me of not loving her and not wanting her past tomorrow, though it was she that couldn’t see tomorrow. There was so much more to her than that she allowed there to be and though she gave in abundance such erotic pleasures with her body and was subservient so masterfully that I couldn’t help but to be grossly pleased with what she gave, I wanted more. More than her body. The more she gave the more I wanted and I found myself addicted to her much the way she was addicted to alcohol. I was insatiable but there was no clinic for the likes of me. No support groups. No inhibitors.

We made love in public places and ruined our reputation to strangers and friends alike who saw more of our affection than they likely desired, but they did not exist in my mind when I was with her. I alienated family for her; quit a job because of her; dropped friends to satisfy her; anything for her. I bought her dresses and dressed her up the way one would a doll and I attempted to amuse her while we sat on the porch with jokes and quips that came so naturally. Sometimes she would laugh, other times she would be as silent as the toad in the hyacinths or the concrete cherub that sat on the porch stoop as though waiting perpetually to say something or do something or to be someone he wasn’t. To spit meaningful words as he once spit water from atop a fountain. She was the same in that respect, waiting in that same way staring off into the distance.

When it rained she was excited the way the toad was excited and she hopped down from the porch to dance in it. Though drunk, the emotion was sincere and she smiled rapturously looking up to the heavens and catching the rain upon her beautiful face which was both innocent and lascivious, all in equal measure. However she achieved such a balance, I would never know, but I suppose it is more a testament of my perception of her rather than her actual being for she was, in truth, the most unbalanced person I ever knew. The most unpredictable and undependable and by far, the most irregular. But I saw her with one prurient eye and one virtuous one and the conflict raged in me as the hypocrisy raged in her until I at last resolved that she wasn’t a real person at all but some sort of apparition. Though she was flesh and bone and beauty and emotion, she was so unstable that I doubted at times that she was real and instead considered that she may have been peeled off one of those scrapped bomber planes and given life. She was too beautiful for life and she simply did not exist until I touched her.
 
A few weeks before she died she asked me to dance in the rain with her and held out her hand, but I stood there under the safety of the porch roof in the dry amber glow of the Edison bulb, beneath spiders that ate junebugs. In dryness I felt safety, though I may not have been safe at all. And in wetness, out there in the dark with her, there was all that wasn’t safe. That which she seemed at peace in. Bathing in warm darkness and showering in cold rain. And she twirled on the cracked sidewalk and laughing in the dark she sang a song I don’t remember and seemed only briefly dismayed by my lack of impetuosity which had long been a quality or a flaw of mine, however you see it. I admired her in that moment, maybe more than any other. Carelessly splashing in puddles like a child by the curbside. Kicking rain playfully at an invisible friend. And in that moment, in the darkness and laughter of that night, no other man existed in this world and she was darling and faithful.

She didn’t leave a voicemail when she called last. Just a breath or two before she hung up. I had never ignored her before and she must have known I was ignoring her call and not asleep. I watched the phone light up and go dark in the blackened room. I heard it vibrating on the mattress. I wonder what she would have said to me, what it was she wanted to say. I wonder if she would have lived if I had answered. But I drifted to sleep on that rainy summer night knowing I had to work the next morning and assuming I would hear from her then. I was upset that evening because she decided to stay home rather than to come in and see me. I was upset that she refused to meet for a drink somewhere; though it was against my better judgment to encourage her drinking, it was bait I knew she wouldn’t normally refuse. But she did refuse. King Kong could have invited her to have drinks and she would have gone.

I wanted her in such a way that I was ashamed, and knowing I was addicted, I wanted not to be addicted and the only way I would realize sobriety was without her, to ignore her at whatever expense to myself and her. It was the only way to save myself from ruin. I knew I only wanted her that night for pleasure, not for her company or the funny things she said randomly, or the playful impetuous things she did to make me smile and tempt me to be more like her and not my boring self. Not for her lighthearted gaiety or her innocence that she maintained despite her flirtations with other men and infidelities that she swore were only innocent responses to messages they sent to her. My intentions were entirely derived of my concupiscence which had overtaken any moral and virtuous purpose I ever had for her. But I had hope in my heart that she might somehow be restored in my judgment and maybe, through a miracle of God, I would again trust her and want her for more than pleasure. I had such hopes for Victoria Victoria.

The next morning there were four missed calls from her number. The last of which was at 3:47am, which is when I gather she swallowed the pills. She never called unless we were fighting, unless she felt I was absolutely going to give up on her this time because of the alcoholism and the mental instability that caused her to angrily accuse me of phantom infidelity, being guilty herself. She always texted and I knew by the level of suicidal threat in her texts I read and reread just how drunk she was. She was usually drunk or drinking heavily in the bathtub and submerging her head beneath the water. She sent me a picture of herself in the tub a few times with water to the bottom of her big hazel eyes. She looked like a crocodile, I thought. Beautiful always in that pure and vulnerable way, but not like herself in those manic moments when the end she chased was at her fingertips. In that frozen, hollow, desperate stare that left me cold.

I thought of the first time we met as I rocked on the porch without her. She wasn’t the kind of girl who could grow old, I knew. She would never make it because she couldn’t endure. She was lost in childhood and would never be a woman; there would always have to be someone to take care of her and she would accuse everyone of taking advantage of her because of her lack of independence which was rooted in her perpetual immaturity of which she had no willingness to mature. 

She looked like Lolita grown up. Standing there, careless posture, unnatural candy-red hair, moon glow skin, pouting lips; saying nothing, doubting everything she did or thought. Big eyes that roamed like dirty secrets behind those huge dark plastic sunglasses which slid down her little freckled nose. It was after Humbert Humbert had his way with her, or she had her way with him. I never got the full story, nor did I press it. It was after the last page was turned, the book closed and shelved and left alone for a dozen years. She was substantially beautiful in a tragic way, and she needn’t fake anything with lipstick or eyeliner the way other women do. Those dreadful wingtips women paint to look like damned Egyptian queens, the fake eyelashes, the orange skin paint hoping to turn as many eyes as possible, which they associated with self-worth.

She was exempt from all that, an anomaly, I thought. A naturally beautiful girl, much too beautiful for her place in a fake world and much too uncertain of her standing in it. She was real and wanted to be fake, while most people are fake and want to be real. And what I thought was simply nervousness that could be settled with a drink or two, or words and time, proved to be melancholy of the worst sort, the kind that pills, love, or patience could never fix. She was the kind of book that was categorized under tragedy; that which I knew wouldn’t end well or satisfactorily for me in any conceivable way, or her, yet I read it anyway because it was too gripping to put down once the first page was read. She was like a Ouija board who I fiddled with against my better judgment, an outlet that I stuck with a butter knife, a train track I tied myself to, a fire I jumped into. I drank her like she drank her hardcider beers. I smoked her like she smoked marijuana. And I knew from first look that only death would sever our relationship. Or so I thought.

I stopped writing. Reminding myself that I sat down to write her eulogy in case I was asked by her family to do so because I am a writer and I was the person she was closest to in the end. I doubt they would ask me though because they would blame me for her death because she never told the truth to anyone and I was a sinister figure to them like Humbert Humbert was. She told abridged truths and omitted inconvenient facts the way political parties do. So her family may dissolve me from any responsibility and even scowl at me at the funeral and blame me with their scornful eyes for her absurdly premature death, not realizing I had fought against that which killed her, and that nothing could have saved her besides for herself or an act of God for which no one but me was ever praying. And I would look back at them with these eyes, indicting each and everyone one of them as they pretended to mourn, garnering sympathy for themselves, pretending that her suicide was unexpected because it was they who killed her in their careless collusion. They who ignored her alcoholism, encouraged it even to fight her depression, guilty as a doctor prescribing bad medicine or a dope dealer dealing dope. 

It was they who bought my sweet Victoria Victoria more when she had none, her father being her example drinking himself closer to death every night, her sisters addicted to meth and coke, and no one ever saying a word against her ruining herself in the way she did for they were ruined and wanted her to be no better rather than better than them. Goddamn communists, I might have called them at her funeral.

But I would not go to the funeral and scrapped the idea of writing a glossy eulogy that I would tear my way through, pause to compose myself, and open for some corny sad song they would play after me as she lied cake-faced and bloated in an overpriced casket in a tacky dress she never would have worn alive. Instead, drunk on a bottle of brandy, I went to the city morgue and decided to speak to her myself. To have our own funeral. To say all that I hadn’t said when she was living and maybe, I thought in my crapulence, it might wake her the way fairytale princesses were awoken by princes before feminism gave them dicks.

It wasn’t hard to find, though I had no idea it was in the basement of the hospital which reminded me of Pee Wee Herman looking for his precious lost bike in the basement of the Alamo for some reason. Maybe because we had watched that movie together and laughed like we were seven because Pee Wee was such a gay nerd and she said she thought she remembered he got busted for child porn or jerking off in an adult movie theater and I said I didn’t know because I loved Pee Wee and didn’t like my childhood heroes ruined by unproven accusations the way Michael Jackson was. But that was neither here nor there and the only reason I thought of it was because I was drunk and driving over to the morgue.

I quickly found out they don’t just let anyone in the morgue, but when I’m drunk I sometimes think I can do anything, like I have X-Ray eyes, or I am invisible. I used to think like that all the time when I was a kid, but now I only think that way when I’m drunk. So I stood there at the door, thinking of walking through the wall as I rang the buzzer. I said I was with the funeral home and needed to come get her, saying her name, Victoria Victoria, as plainly as I could as though it didn’t matter to me at all who she was, or that the very mention of her name didn’t arouse me. The old man who I suppose was some kind of doctor, who in my skepticism I thought likely screwed his fair share of sleeping beauties or pretty boys, asked for my credentials and I said I left them at the funeral home. I didn’t know how it worked or what I would do when I had her, but when I’m drunk, like I already said, I can do anything. He said he remembered the name and gave me a number, 47, and added that she was the prettiest girl in the morgue in a dismaying way that made my stomach turn.

Dr. Kevorkian, I’ll call him, let me in and said they didn’t expect us until the morning since it was the Fourth of July and I said they sent me early and I asked to fill out the forms, figuring there were forms to be filled out. He smiled and said sure and retrieved a clipboard with some forms on it that I filled out after he got me a pen that would write (the first one was dead as everyone in the room but for me and Jack the necrophiliac). Then I thought, shit, I didn’t want to take her and didn’t know what I was doing but everything was going alright and so fast that I decided to just go with it and I filled out the forms like I knew what I was doing and I asked the doctor if he was new and he said he was filling in for Paula, like I should know Paula, and I laughed and said to tell Paula I said hello. And when he asked my name I looked at him with such scorn that he blushed like a rebuked child.

“Tom. Tom from Sheridan,” I said a little too indignantly. But no matter. 

“Tom,” he repeated red-faced extending his clammy hand. He shook his head and smiled with apologies in his eyes and a grin and promised he would tell her, as though it meant the world to me. Then he pointed me down a row of bodies covered by white sheets on metal tables and suddenly I was creeped out. I had never seen a dead person before, let alone to stand in a roomful of them. They were humps under white sheets like snowy mountain ranges of varying sizes. I never figured I would make it this far but here I was, about to kidnap Victoria Victoria when all that I wanted was to talk to her for a few minutes, to say goodbye or something. To know what I didn’t know. To have closure of some sort.

“You have a gurney?” he asked.

“I never bring a gurney,” I lied. Truthfully, I didn’t know what a gurney was. “I always just use yours and get them to the wagon.”

“You need any help?”

“No,” I replied confidently. “I’ll manage.” I saw that the table had wheels and I said to hell with it and flipped off the locks and wheeled her out of the room. He got the door for me and we were gone. I was sure someone would stop me at some point as I walked down the hallway slowly like I knew what I was doing, but no one did. There was a hospital cop hitting on a nurse at a nurse’s station and I looked at her sympathetically but she had sin in her eyes and didn’t want foreign sympathy. She wanted off the night shift. His eyes were vacant and full of her face and never met mine. I breathed a sigh of relief and got Victoria Victoria into the parking garage and to my car which was small and not perfect for hauling dead girlfriends, but which would have to do. There was no going back now. I wasn’t worried because the backseats folded down and I knew she would fit comfortably, though comfortably was the wrong adjective because she was dead so comfort was of no concern really. But she fit like a glove and all was well. 

I left the gurney beside my car and pulled out, accidentally squealing my tires due to how clumsily I shifted and the weight of my nervous foot heavy upon the gas. Fireworks exploded overhead from the fairgrounds and I realized we had made plans to go and watch them together. It felt very sad to me that we would never spend a Fourth of July together. We would never see fireworks together. I don’t know why it made me cry but I cried as those fireworks burst overhead as though they were telling on me. I began to feel paranoid as I got closer to the apartment that a cop would swoop in behind me and turn on his lights.   

When we got home I carried her inside and took off the sheet and she was as beautiful as ever, naked but cold as though she slept all night in air-conditioning without a blanket. The morgue was cold, I recalled. Like a freezer. A meat locker, they call it. I laid her in bed and lit some candles because that seemed appropriate for some reason. I even got out the Ouija board and centered the pointer on the board. I don’t know why. I sat there beside my bed and watched the light from the candles flicker off her face and naked body and I half-expected her to wake up if I jostled her in such a way and I began thinking about making love to her but that was disturbing so I just sat there and looked at her and thought, regretted, and sobered up. 

As I sobered I realized it was only a matter of time before they figured out that I had stolen her. They would come to the house to get her and arrest me. I remembered reading somewhere that God puts impulsive thoughts in your head and my impulsive thought was to follow her and find her wherever she had gone because God was telling me that I could bring her back home. Or was it just another drunk superpower I thought I had and I recalled trying as a kid to raise a hamster from the dead but to no avail.

Strangely, I wasn’t overcome with grief. Or maybe I just didn’t know what grief was. I thought I did. I thought when my hamster died, when my dog died, when my grandfather died, I grieved, but I don’t know anymore. I didn’t feel any different then than I do now. Maybe I suffer from perpetual grief so I don’t know when I am actually grieving, or general apathy. I didn’t know what this was, other than I wanted to talk to her and see her again. To say the things I didn’t say to her before she did it. To not feel so bad because I didn’t take her seriously and answer her calls one last time. I love her but I never convinced her that I loved her. So I slit my wrists and bled out there on the sandy-colored carpet and slumped over as nonchalantly as a sleeping dog. Terribly impulsive, I know, but I was determined to find her in the afterlife. The knife was my passport and I had just purchased my ticket. The initial burst of blood from the vein startled me as it shot up like a geyser, but when it settled and poured gently down my arm and into the carpet, I closed my eyes and let go. I was determined that I would bring her back to life and make her understand that she loves me as I love her. 

When I was a boy I believed that Heaven was in the clouds, like a lot of little boys do. I believed that God looked something like Wilford Brimley and there was oatmeal and cotton candy for everyone to eat and it smelled nice and all the toilets were filled with blue water. I believed that you went to Hell if you were bad, by cursing a lot or spitting excessively, and the Devil probably looked a lot like Vincent Price with red skin and horns and puss-filled scabs. With a tail and a pitchfork. Hell, of course, was fire and brimstone and smelled like shit. If there was one thing I never considered it was that Heaven and Hell might look very much like Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Tucson, Arizona. Not much different than this life or this world at all; rather, very much the same. If I knew that as a boy, I would have been very disappointed because the contrast wasn’t great enough and the greatness of life when you’re a kid is measured in contrasts. Big and small. Light and dark. Happy and sad. Far and near. 

I had no doubt that I would find her and bring her back to life. And that that is why I was here, allowed to come by whoever or whatever makes these things happen. And walking in to wherever it was that I was, down a long hot and sticky highway in my tennis shoes and jeans, I only knew that I was dead and that this wasn’t the living world. There were no signs of life around me other than a random cactus and an occasional bird that flew by or lizard that scurried past my feet. There was a blue banner sky and large puffy clouds that looked like things such as jack rabbits and turtles and naked women riding on the backs of polar bears. But just when I thought I was in Hell there blew an occasional breeze that cooled me down and I knew that it must be Heaven because I knew that Hell would have no breeze; no reprieve at all from the heat. No blue sky. Probably no birds. Maybe a cactus. The case for it being Heaven included a highway that was marked with yellow lines and free of potholes; the shoes on my feet; the freedom to roam; no litter alongside the road; and of course, the aforementioned breeze that rolled across the desert valley and made the stifling heat bearable. There too was the beauty of the hills and the landscape in the distance and I can’t imagine there being any sort of beauty in Hell.

The case for it being Hell was the oppressive heat. The fact that I was on foot with no destination known, seemingly left to wander aimlessly. Then again, I was free of any pain, my wrists were healed, and I didn’t feel any sense of sorrow. Hell must be a painful and sorrowful place where everyone has kidney stones and gout. Or so I thought.

I looked back and saw a large white Cadillac El Dorado convertible which rolled up towards me from behind. The driver slowed down to cruise alongside of me. He wore big black sunglasses, black clothes and reminded me of someone familiar. With a second look I realized he was Johnny Cash, but he didn’t sing or say much of anything at all other than to tell me to get in and he would give me a lift. I did because there seemed no better option and being that I was dead already, what did I have to lose? Why would I refuse a ride with Johnny Cash? My feet were relieved and he drove off and I watched the black fuzzy dice sway like the balls of a horse in gallop beneath the rectum of the rear-view mirror. He knew my thought and laughed and asked me why was I thinking of horse balls at a time like this, and I said I don’t know and that I don’t think I ever actually saw horse balls which made him laugh more and say, “My God son.”

My driver, Mr. Cash, it was quite clear to me, had the ability to mind read, which I possessed when I was nine for at least one summer. Maybe he just looked and sounded like Johnny Cash. I don’t know if he was the Devil or if he was God, or if there was a difference, or if there were such people or things, but he looked more like the Devil, though maybe only because he grinned a lot, had slicked-back hair, was clean shaven, and was dressed in black. I noticed he had snake skin boots with metal toes and for whatever reason I didn’t think that God would ever wear those kind of boots and I wondered what kind of boots God would wear before the thought became ridiculous to me and vanished the way ridiculous thoughts do. He didn’t say much to me at all. He looked over and occasionally glanced at me. 

I thought he would say something, but he didn’t. I expected him to sing, but he didn’t. Instead he flicked on the radio and “Beat on the Brat” by The Ramones played and he tapped the big steering wheel with his hand. He turned the volume up until my eardrums nearly split before they adjusted. He sang along with no shame in that baritone voice of his, butchering the lyrics. It gave me a relief from his mind-reading powers. Yet still I tried to keep it clear but I couldn’t and I wondered what he thought about all the things that were pin-balling in my brain. Of course, I thought about the most perverted things I could think about as though the act in trying not to conjured them, all of which I am too ashamed to repeat. Times with my Victoria Victoria and then some.

About two or three miles up the highway we stopped at a diner on the edge of a small town and he pulled into the gravel lot and put the car in park. I’ve always liked the sound of rubber tires on gravel for some reason. The song ended as though on cue and he flicked the radio off and I noticed his hands were tattooed with black cats, Roman numerals, some kind of writing, and flames. He looked over at me and said, “She’s in there, son” as though he needn’t say more. 

I didn’t ask him any questions because I knew who he was talking about and I got out of the car and thanked him for the ride and watched his taillights fade away in the purpling sunset like a demon scooting backwards away from me. There were black hills in the distance and evening was ceding to night slowly in the reluctant way it does. The diner was lit up with bright neon lights that read just that, “Diner, Diner, Diner,” bleeding red, green, then yellow and repeating the cycle, mesmerizing me. I stood there and stared like I was a tourist that had never seen simple neon lights before. There were a half dozen cars in the gravel lot and some semi-trucks, and some motorcycles growling in and out and to and from in the distance. I went inside, excited to see Victoria Victoria in the afterlife, still unsure if it was Heaven or Hell, now guessing it may be something more like purgatory. I was simpleminded in my desire to seek a definition for everything, even the things I could not possibly understand.

The air conditioning felt wonderful, and as I slid into a cold vinyl-seated booth behind a gold-flake Formica table to take my seat, I wondered if we were still a couple, or if death was an automatic breakup. Or if there was a rule I didn’t know about. I rubbed my face because I think too much and death offered me no relief from that malady at all, in fact, it only seemed to augment it. My mind was a broken faucet drip, drip, dripping into a stopped sink of stagnant thoughts. 

I picked up the laminated menu and perused it and found the usual American fare and I figured it must be Hell because there were no vegetarian options. My obsession to know which place this was pestered me to the point I looked around obsessively for clues and even scoured the menu for the presence or lack of angel food cake or deviled eggs, figuring Heaven wouldn’t offer the latter, nor Hell the former on principle alone. 

Then I saw her in a throwback coral-colored waitress dress and with her hair up in a crimson bun. My God, she was as beautiful as ever with big bright hazel eyes and soft moonlit skin and that smile that was seductive and sinful. She was bouncing around the place, booth to booth, and occasionally I caught her looking out the window and something in her eyes made me very sad for wherever we were, she didn’t seem at peace at all. There was the longing in her eyes that I had seen in life which nothing could satisfy. They were only different when we made love. They were contented then. But when the lovemaking ended, as inevitably it must, her eyes went back to the way they were before we began. To the way they are now. 

I patiently waited for her to come to me, gazing at her hungrily but not lustfully. For a moment it felt as though my heart might burst in anticipation, as though there was an excited Indian in my chest voraciously beating on it with a elk bone, but finally it relented when she came to my booth, stood square with the table and put her order pad to her face and asked what she could get me, tailing it with an insincere generic “hun.” I could have been anyone to her and she clearly didn’t know my face. She struggled to make eye contact though I stared her dead in the dead eye.

“My God,” I said, “Don’t you even recognize me?”

“No,” she muttered nervously. “I’ve never met you before. I’m kind of new here.”

“So am I,” I said sharply. “I followed you.”

“Followed me? From where?” She appeared slightly agitated and scared.

“From life. I’m Paul. Your Victoria Victoria. You’re a Sagittarius. Your eyes are hazel but green in certain lights and you giggle when I kiss the back of your knees.”

She took a step back before gathering what she would say to that. Looking around as though she might call for the manager. “Victoria Victoria? You’ve never kissed the back of my knees. Now, please, may I take your order or what?”

I tactically retreated for the moment, slightly dejected. Even though she said she didn’t remember me, I was still optimistic because I was here and so was she which made my intuition about killing myself to find her correct. Moreover, I figured that I could kidnap her from here if need be the way I kidnapped her from the morgue. “Coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast.”

She quickly wrote my order down, smiled politely but skeptically at me, barely making eye contact with those big flying saucer eyes and looked up and out the large diner window which was gleaming clean in the twilight. And I followed her eyes to those blackening vacant hills beyond the cars that rolled away in the distance like screaming demons. It was as though she were expecting someone or something out there, but got nothing in return. Then she disappeared to give my order ticket to the cooks. 

There was a line of paper on a window and she hung mine up behind the last one, then grabbed a pot of coffee which looked like a fish bowl with a white handle and walked around refilling cups before she got to mine with a new white porcelain one that she promptly filled carefully not to spill it. I looked down into the cup and what I saw startled me. I saw all my life in the blackness. My dead hamster lying on her side in a bed of wood shavings. Every good and bad thing I ever did. Every person who ever meant anything to me, and even some that I had all but forgotten, lost in the dust of time. Every meaningful moment, right there in a black swirl that dissipated in a cloud of steam to my face. I neither cried nor laughed. I neither submitted nor resisted to the memories that swirled. I simply sat there and stared into that cup of coffee and watched it roll on and I was at peace as I had never been in life.

When Victoria Victoria came around again with my eggs and toast teetering on a thin arm with other plates balancing precariously as well, I stopped her and grabbed her arm. “This isn’t life; it’s the afterlife,” I warned her sternly. “But I’ve come to take you back.”

“You’re crazy,” she chortled. “I don’t know what it is about this place, but all kinds of crazy folks blow through here and say all kinds of crazy things like that. I’ve heard all kinds, seen all kinds. But they come and they go and they take their cheap pickup lines with them just like you will. Sure as the sun sets. My feet hurt from a double shift. My head aches. My heart’s broken, and I’m lonely. So, mister, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the afterlife,” she said plainly. “What more is there?”

“Victoria Victoria,” I plead.

“How did I die then, mister?”

“Name’s Paul. Not mister.”

“Okay, well, Paul. Then how did I die?” She smiled at me in disbelief, waiting for a laugh.

“You killed yourself.”

Her face drew paler when I said it, like I hit her with a board and it was suddenly not a joke and I was not as crazy as I was just seconds before. It was almost as though she believed me and I winded her with my diagnosis of her unfortunate cause of death.

“Why is your heart broken?” I asked.

She hesitated and sighed. “I don’t know. It’s just always been that way.”

“No, Victoria. It really hasn’t. You were depressed and tried to drink it away but you only made things worse. You tried calling me the night you killed yourself but I didn’t answer. I wasn’t asleep but I was tired and didn’t answer because I didn’t want to hear it anymore. I’m sorry. What did you want to tell me?”

She didn’t reply. She stood there staring at me.

I went on. “So I killed myself to find you. To save you from Hell.” I thought she would get googly-eyed and find it terribly romantic as I thought that it was. I thought she would know how much I love her, at last, and jump into my arms. But she stood there with a plates of cocktail shrimp and steak and eggs in her arms looking back at me like I was anyone. Like I could be anyone. I continued my case, “Now that I am here, you can come back! I know you can come back with me or else I wouldn’t be here. Don’t you see. They let me come get you. You just have to leave this place and we can go home. I can help you with your depression. With the alcohol and everything.”

I felt stupid saying it when it came out. I hadn’t helped her while she was living, so what made me think I could help her when she came back from the dead. Still, I wanted to try because I found in it a purpose that I was dedicated to, perhaps, to a fault. Perhaps, I laughed mockingly at myself, knowing that I plunged myself into the valley of death to save her. I thought of the times I called the police when she was going to kill herself. I thought of the alcohol I poured out before she could drink it. Holding her hair as she vomited the poison from her stomach. Making sure she slept on her side so she didn’t drown on her own vomit. The sour feeling of scouring her phone for proof of infidelity. And I thought of having sex with her on a country back road and fingering her in a church pew when she wore a dress with no panties. I had saved her from her sins and sinned with her. I had loved her, been obsessed with her, and did all that I knew how to do to deliver her from evil by plunging myself down in it. This insatiable self-destructive nymph who was now on the scrapheap of death where she belonged. Oh, Victoria Victoria!

She stood there still holding plates of food and stared back at me. The plates rattled with her nervousness. Then someone woke her up by pleading, “Miss, miss!” She snapped back to reality and passed out the plates and attended to the needy patron who was an elderly lady with a genuinely sweet face who probably died of old age, I presumed. Still, Victoria Victoria glanced back at me and I knew that something in her connected to what I said; that she knew I wasn’t just another crazy person passing through to wherever it is that people go here. That I didn’t offer her just a cheap pickup line and an invitation to a motel nearby. This was Bliss, Texas I heard someone say. Bliss, Texas, I thought. Surely not.

I went to the jukebox and they had the song I wanted to play, “Forever Young” by Alphaville. When she heard it, she stopped in her tracks and untied her apron and it fell to the black-and-white tiled floor and she began singing the song in the aisle of the diner and everyone smiled because she was so pretty and she had a beautiful singing voice. “Are you going to drop the bomb or not?” God, how I missed her voice. Singing songs that played on her phone as we sat on the porch with a beer by her on the white porch rail. A beer that would disappear to be replaced by another and another until her eyes were glassed-over and she turned to me and said she was ready to go to bed as though she had to drink her way to it. I missed the sound of the chains creaking with our weight, and how despairing the creak was with mine alone. There was a difference that I knew. It was like a different song. An entirely different voice.

When the song ended she closed her eyes and rubbed them, shook her head, then returned to her normal self and picked up her apron and tied it around her waist and went back to work. I had hope still, but then she came back to me with a bill and laid it flat on the table and simply thanked me for coming in without saying anything else at all. And there was nothing written on the bottom of the bill. No smiley face or hearts I hoped for. No Xs or Os. When I asked if she remembered, she coldly replied no, that she didn’t. And when I asked if she believed me, she also said no, that she didn’t. I had no more money for the jukebox or perhaps I would have played another song. Maybe “What you Give” by Tesla, or something I can still hear her sing in my mind now and then. But I checked my wallet and pulled out the cash and laid it on the table, sadly defeated. I left a three dollar tip, which emptied my wallet. She walked away as though she didn’t give a damn one way or another. I forgave it to the fact that she just didn’t remember, always making an excuse for her. Nothing changed.

I stood in the parking lot in my jeans and shirt and my wrists began to bleed as they had in life when I cut them to be with her. It didn’t startle me though it should have. It was like being in a dream when something dreadful happens, yet it is ordinary to you. It was fast getting dark and it began to rain and the rain washed away what little blood trickled down my arms and I wiped them clean with my hands and held my palms up to cleanse them. I stood there in the rain looking back at the diner. I watched her walk between tables and walk up and down that aisle thirty, forty times. Occasionally she would look out the window with that longing in her eyes that I knew all too well. She looked over me at the darkening sky above the black hills then back at the table she cleaned, or served, the empty dishes she carried away, or the plate of food she passed out, or the cup of coffee she filled and refilled. And though I was no more than fifty feet from her, I never felt so distant. The rain poured harder and its rhythm seduced me, though I have never been one to be seduced other than by Victoria Victoria.

I wasn’t sure where I would go from here, or what I would do, but I was confident that something would happen to guide me along my way like Johnny Cash in the white Cadillac that got me here to begin with. Cars passed by me and night took its place the natural way that it does and I felt like a mouse swallowed by a snake, a few streaks of lightning for teeth, the wet night was his black insides which I slid down into, indulgently devoured. 

I felt consumed by death and despairingly hopeless, like God was punishing me for the church incident or for my sexual immorality as a whole. For enjoying, rather than deploring it. For something I did to someone along the way that I couldn’t take back. And in the afterlife, she would never realize happiness and I would never realize her. It was our Hell. Maybe I would have to come back to the diner over and over only to be rejected by her again and again. And she would go home in this world and want to kill herself to escape it, but she wouldn’t be able to. No knife or razor would cut her, and no pills would stop her heart. She would have to endure the perpetual rape of existing.

The diner was still lit up even brighter in contrast with the dark and I stood there looking at her face in the window glass as she waited her tables and she occasionally looked out, not at me, but to whatever she looked out to earlier. To nothing or no one, I guess. To whatever that root was that depressed her of which she never spoke. The abusive boyfriend. Her Humbert Humbert. She was as beautiful as she was in life but I had failed to convince her that she was who she was and that living was a far better prospect than dying, that life was better than death. I failed. And in my defeat, even I began to doubt it and much like that mouse might, I resigned myself to the rotten belly of an indignant fate.

But as the rain poured and the passenger door of an orange idling semi-truck opened and offered me a ride to someplace else, Victoria Victoria burst from the diner and called out to me. And I turned to catch her in my arms and I cried as I kissed her and she cried as she took my kisses and returned them to me as ravenously as they were given. And she whispered in my ear that she remembered and she smiled and laughed saying she never thought I would ever dance in the rain or laugh in the dark. And I happily replied that I never thought I would either and spun her around carelessly and cars honked and passed and the diesel engine of the waiting orange truck puled in an impatient protest. 

We were happy in the moment and it felt as though everything would end well, that she would return to me, but a dower look overcame her sorrowful face and she seemed to melt and fade away in my arms. What happiness was only a minute ago, what hope and optimism that sprung, crumbled and she pushed away from me as she did when she was a drunk heretic.

“I remember too much,” she began to cry. I could not distinguish raindrops from tears, but her eyes were bloodshot and glassed-over once again. Though she hadn’t drunk a drop, it looked as though she was drunk and in that far distant place where I could never go to get her.

“I called you to confess,” she admitted in my arms. “I was unfaithful to you. That last night. That is why I did it. I couldn’t live with myself with what I did. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t have to ask with who. It didn’t matter and I knew that old Humbert Humbert had come back. There were dozen of times that she talked to someone but never met, she said, sent pictures to someone she didn’t care about simply for the attention of it. For the heart reacts, the fake love, the likes. The desperate men who played in contrast to me, who she slandered for their sympathy. My costly dignity for their cheap affection. The lurid invitations in private messages that she ate as flattery. 

She would periodically call or send pictures to her abusive ex, Humbert Humbert, though she cried an apologized for it saying it wasn’t her true self. Spasmodic lapses of better judgment, or was the anomaly the good girl I held on to for a while too long. She that made only an occasional cameo. I don’t know. She promised she would get better and fix herself. Stop drinking. Stop smoking pot. But she never did. She continued to throw herself and everything she said she loved away. So what did it matter that she did it one more time. To such an end. I should have expected it all along. It was building up to that inevitable ruinous climax. I shouldn’t have been so damn naive. One more beer, she always said. One more drink.

It all ended with some mystery guy who would hear about her suicide in passing and probably mention it to friends at a bar and for it to be a joke between friends as they sit in shitty BW3s and drink beer and watch college football and googly eye fat-bottomed girls with Hep C who have been railed to hell and back by half the town. It didn’t matter how or why, it only mattered that it was and it was a death from which no afterlife succeeds. There is only a zombie deathly existence that can host no love or happiness after such blunt infidelity. It’s all pretend to say or think otherwise, that some counselor can help, or that all can be forgiven. She was a trollop, a white trash dim-witted bawd who plagued me like a parasite for too long because I refused to swallow the anecdote to her that was a simple no, or a more eloquent fuck off.

Down the hatch, I said as I let loose of her. She fell to the ground dramatically in a sort of broken curtsy and cried in a puddle that she pretended was her own tears as the rain fell heavily upon us and beat the ground like wet fists. She cried that I didn’t really love her and that I would be replaced by someone. A hundred guys want me; could have someone in two minutes; someone will appreciate this...on and on. She probably really didn’t think I loved her I thought looking at the train wreck of her soul staring back up at me. Even though I killed myself to find her in death, she didn’t think I love her. 

She said at least she was honest, as though she should be rewarded and all should be forgiven. I walked away and got in the orange truck and shut the door before I changed my mind. My arms bled and bled. I looked back at her and she was sobbing in the puddle. Then I saw some gentleman help her to her feet unaware of what he was doing, thinking I was abusive or less for my actions and I was sure she was vilifying me in the afterlife for his sympathy which she would eat up but be no more sustained as she had in life. She would probably cling to him, if they do that here in this afterlife. If they let people love who shouldn’t. Sleep with whoever. Mess with people’s emotions, plague others, burrow into souls like parasites and fester, and take what love they can take and neglect it when they have it.

The truck driver took a deep breath. “Seen enough?”

I nodded and didn’t look over at him. Tears weld in my pathetic eyes and what poison she put in me fell with them. Maybe I finally wept for my hamster or for every terrible thing that ever happened to me. Maybe it had nothing to do with her at all. This was called acceptance.

“Hurts don’t it?” he said with true country prosody. The gentleman genuflected by Victoria Victoria’s body as though he were proposing. I looked away and ahead to the highway.

“Well, at least you didn’t shoot the bitch down.” I didn’t have to look at him to know he was the same one that drove me in. Mr. Johnny Cash. He began to sing a song as he put the semi into gear. I recognized it as “Cocaine Blues” and he looked at me and smiled here and there. I listened as he drove and smiled at him in gratitude for his effort in cheering me up. The tears slowly dried and she was all but forgotten by song’s end. So I tell myself.

“Now what?” I asked after the last verse.

“Well, now you go back home.” He gave me a black handkerchief with which I cleaned my arms up. “Go to sleep, son. When you wake up, it’ll all be over. You had to see for yourself or else you’d’ve lived a tormented life thinkin’ she was what she ain’t.”

Although still hurting, I smiled at him and fell asleep and when I opened my eyes I was laying in a hospital bed with my arms mummified in thick white gauze. It was a peaceful room, sterile-looking with nothing on the walls. No excitement and very little hope, but no death. Not even in the corners. No one left me any flowers but it didn’t matter to me. Someone left a potted plant, one of those green waxy-leafed things that you can’t kill, probably my mother, or maybe it was left by the last person who either died or went home. Looking around I wondered how many people had died in the room. How it was when they died and if anyone cared that they did, or did it come as a relief? I wondered if they were where I was. In Bliss, Texas. If they all pass through that diner, or a diner like it. If they all meet Johnny Cash. 

I was put on probation for stealing Victoria Victoria’s body. Felony theft of a corpse, or something. They said they understood that I was upset about her death and that I loved her very much. I never said that. My lawyer used it as a defense. I never told anyone about the afterlife. I never told her family that she was a cocotte or a waitress. They wouldn’t have believed me or understood what I meant. I didn’t go to her funeral, but I sent flowers. I was sure they said all kinds of good things about her and I didn’t want to choke on my spit. No one tells any truth at a funeral. They just kind of white-lie-it or they pay someone to give grand prevarications they haven’t the creativity to offer. I heard someone say she was the prettiest girl they had ever seen in a casket. 

I wrote her a eulogy, but it was one that no one would ever read and one that didn’t favor her memory or forgive her at all. I suppose we say harsh things when we are hurt by someone, though they deserve better. When we get less than what we deserve of people and they simply don’t love like we love, care like we care, or appreciate what we’ve done for them. I have myself to blame for letting myself love a black hole with a Disney World body.

I never visited her grave and I never again danced in the rain or laughed in the dark. The porch swing was just fine without her, but it wasn’t ever fine without the person I thought that she was. Pretenders come and go. Love passes like the seasons, unfortunately. So little is real in life or stays. People throw people away for the hope of better people. Much is plastic flowers and artificial grass and rented caskets and bullshit eulogies. Even what seems like natural beauty is often faked. Perhaps that is why I treasure my sorrows and my happiness that come in equal measure the way the rain and sun come. I look at the whitening scars on my wrists and think of telling someone that the afterlife is neither clouds nor fire and brimstone. It is much more ordinary. It is Johnny Cash and Bliss, Texas and a simple diner with bacon and eggs.

I tell the concrete cherub on the porch and the toad in the hyacinth. They keep me company until God gives me someone good, if ever He gives me someone at all. Maybe if He does I will tell her about Victoria Victoria, or maybe I’ll just leave it all alone. Stealing a dead body isn’t a good subject for a budding romance. I sit and swing. Maybe Victoria Victoria will come back. Risen from the dead like some damned Egyptian queen. I wait for her but I have no more brandy in the cabinet and I’m all out of superpowers, even when I’m drunk. They say when you lose a limb you sometimes think it is still attached. 

Sometimes in bed I can still feel Victoria Victoria’s body. Sometimes I forgive and miss her and think of finding her again. This old porch swing is empty without her.