In between the frustrated bellows of smoke leaving his lungs, the sound of her blood dripping onto the rosewood floors could be heard. Stooped, like Atlas, Marshall sat nervously puffing away at his fourth cigarette in half an hour, flicking ash against the cold brick wall in front of him. His eyes were wide and unfocused, as the expanse of his mind was limited to one thought, “how could it have gotten this far?”
Lighting another cigarette, he suddenly grasped the curtains shut, with a flourish. He had shut out all the orange, afternoon light that was beaming in through the wall of windows, after reflecting off of the metal and asphalt rooftops of Gramercy. Without the light, he could barely make out her silhouette lying lifeless on the bed sheets, her long, light brown hair covering her face and leaving only the glimmer of her glazed over eyes beneath it. And as he stared at her, he knew that he could love her now, now that she was quiet.
He felt heavy, walking toward her Macbook, the adrenaline had passed, leaving him exhausted as his fingers trembled as he opened the laptop. The glare illuminated his face, and his eyes adjusted to her desktop picture of the resort where they had stayed in Bohol, Philippines. After a few minutes of staring at the screen, he decided to wash his hands again.
The bathroom only had a sliver of window, but it seemed to be a portal in which all the noise of NYU students bantering, taxi horns, charming hooligans rapping, hipsters droning boredom into cell phones, and the squeaking deluxe baby strollers rolling across the pavement would filter through and reverb against the tiled walls and giant, porcelain bathtub. Marshall violently scrubbed, without looking once at the mirror. His eyes still stared at the two razorblades sitting on the drain long after the soap ran off of his hands.
As he let the cold water run over his olive skin, he wondered what she had wanted him to do for her next. Of course, he had to call the police, but there was something tugging at the back of his mind. Marshall walked out of the bathroom, and into her enormous living room, where the walls of mirrors centered on him, willing his eyes to look upon his reflection. Running his fingers through his unkempt, raven hair, down to the scar at the base of his neck, he traced the rubbery tissue out of habit. She had put out her clove cigarette on him as he was heaving into the cool toilet of an anonymous hotel room, jarring him before he had been able to pass out into his own vomit. Breath thick with vermouth and tobacco, she had whispered into his ear, “so you will always think of me.” As if, even if she hadn’t branded him as her own, he could ever stop thinking of her. She was forever in his mind, and he breathed her in everyday from the moment he met her.
The crinkling of paper in his pocket as his body shifted, stirred him from the memory, bringing him to the present, bringing him to what he had let happen. “What if she had wanted to live?”, he wondered aloud. And, as the waters began to pool in his eyes, he quickly blinked them away as if they stung. Shaking his head back and forth, he pulled out the piece of paper from his pocket. Marshall unraveled it gently, pulling at the corners as if they were the wings of the butterflies he used to torture as a child. He smoothed the creases and left the grainy sheet on the suede couch and sat beside it as he lit another Marlboro Red.
Upon seeing her heavy, slanted handwriting, her shrill voice came into his head, as he remembered one of the many nights they spent arguing outside of a nameless Lower East Side hole in the wall. “Marshall, I’m so sick of your fucking face looking at me like that. Like, you’re ashamed. Am I embarrassing you?! I should be the one fucking embarrassed to be seen with you.” The familiar words shot through him, filling up and smoothing out the folds in his slouched torso. She was haunting him already. “Slumming it with an art school drop out who can’t even score me some decent fucking coke.” The outcome of the night weighed heavily on the coke. If it was decent fucking coke, they could have a decent night, sometimes having sex after fighting and drinking and dancing, sometimes waking up to her crying and slamming the bathroom door in his face in the morning. If it hadn’t been decent coke, it would be an endless stream of tears, and the endless effort for Marshall to talk her out of jumping off of the FDR Drive overpass.
He felt the patterns of up-brushed paisley on her silk coat draped on the arm of the couch, and smelled her familiar scent.
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