~Fminor, Cminor, Eminor. lchristopher.

[the minor fall and the major lift.]

~author photo[s] taken by self outside the asylum in princeton where he was called to witness.

Fminor, Cminor, Eminor. lchristopher.

“Does this train go to Babylon?”

It was off this question that I first met Marcy in the
vestibule of the train between Manhattan and Central New Jersey, some
holiday. I could smell the tobacco on her hands and hips. I could
taste the men that had been there before me, and her face was a rash of
butterflies, perfect underneath. We moved in together shortly after,
to a cozy bungalow of an apartment, a four-floor walkup that wasn’t
much more than an attic, really. Late nights I could sing
idiosyncratic pop diatribes to myself, propped up in the sunroom when
we had been fighting upstairs. In those years, the cat would come
down to keep me company, preparing to sun himself in the morning where
the sun pushed itself through the windowpane. He likes me and I have
grown comfortable with him, so comfortable that we have not bothered to
name each other. Silently this happened, no one else close enough to
hear.

“I want to smoke crack in a dilapidated alley in Harlem. I want
to have sex with a black man. I want to fuck a woman on the hood of a
late model car. I want the sun to be shining silver dollars and the
leaves on the trees to be the color of fermented apple berries. I want
you to love me and not to understand why.”

She says these things and I believe her. “You’re so misled,” I
say, thinking of autoimmune hyperactivity and the way her disease eats
normal tissue. She will leave me two years from now. It has been
discussed but in love we are all deaf and dumb; the year is 1999, we
are all slowly retarding ourselves on Britpop fugue and Ecstasy
turnovers.

The night before our bed was blue and sucked warm kisses from her
pale skin. Two bottles of cider beer and the odors of sunset warming
on the windowsill. She has Lupus. Her body is turning in on itself
but it welcomes me freely. She asks me what I am thinking and I tell
her that there are microbes twisting themselves inside both of us, of
presidents on holiday, on the electromagnetic pulse that follows a 20-
megaton nuclear explosion. Her lips part and close around my mouth.
Her calves are pale like flurries scattering over a slow and dying
lawn. She smokes cigarette after cigarette after I fall asleep. Marcy unfolds herself like a gum wrapper, silver and flashing. Her
jewelry box sits on the dresser and there is a small ballerina
pirouetting inside, the music box within jangling in step. I ask her
where she would rather be and she opens my hand and presses her fingers
into the palm as if to say: “Right there.” She is tired but we are
not sleeping. Her hair is tangled and we find the knots together and
it is like a minefield, I tell her, brushing them away. We are
thousands of untimed explosions expanding around each other every
second. We are soldiers being blown to rags and tatters. We are
menstruation on the battlefield. Her brown eyes convulse slowly in
their twin beds of wet. “I don’t believe you,” she tells me. “I
know,” I say. “Wait awhile. Your hair will be short soon.”

Her face is scarred. Her face is scarred and perfect. Every
lover she has cuts her hair, and she his. She cuts the designer tags
off of my stolen clothes when I am not looking. I am shy; she dying.
We have learned to need each other.

And it is November and Marcy has braids, now. Her Lupus,
her wolf tracks whisper to her immune system in short breaths and
misplaced steps. She is going down on me when the phone rings, some
summer afternoon. “It’s the landlord,” she says, breathless; pausing against me.
“He wants us to keep the heat off. He says the boiler might explode.”
Her pubic hair is a small triangular crinkle and her garters have a
taut sleeplessness about them. “I love you,” she tells me. I don’t
run quickly enough to disagree with her. She smokes two packs a day
and her braids are bouncing, bouncing against my knees.

We kiss going over the Verrazano Bridge on our way back from her
parents home, the Island, the side without the toll. Thom Yorke is on
the stereo and it feels that we have all been pre-arranged. What is
love, he wonders, the third person dismissing the cliché. “Jason,”
she says later, when we are home. “Go let the cats in. It’s going
to rain soon.” We don’t speak of her disease, this allergy of herself.
Everything I know has been gleaned from books checked out from the
public library and hidden on the top shelf of our pantry, the one that
is too high for her to reach.

She has a small bronze pillbox she carries her health inside. 
Her only jewelry is twin silver hoops pushed through her labia, she had
gotten them before her body had learned illness. They make her feel
Hollywood, she says. The cat comes inside and shakes himself stiffly.
Soaking wet behind his ears and between the seams. That night we watch
movie reels on the 13 inch television set and listen to jazz records
that spin on the turntable, 33 RPM. St. James Infirmary is the songshe expects me to ask her to dance to, and so I do, gladly. She is so hot underneath my hands that I am glad when Louis Armstrong drops his final, warbling note on the saxophone. I undress her quietly and put
her to bed, opening up the windows against the rain. The smell of
ozone and cool air soon fills these walls, but I am in the sunroom with
a nameless cat, reading the newspaper and thinking aloud.

Come morning the sky is an azure canvas, it is quiet, there is
not a cloud anywhere. I teach her to work a standard shift on the blue
coupe we had bought last week. We are the inbetweens, she says, unsure
that she has made a sound. She has missed her time again, she says,
and I am numb and unconcerned. She mixes our drinks with quinine and
lime before setting out to the Cuban bodega on the corner for bread and
tortilla flour. I didn’t have a job then. No one we knew had jobs
then. She arrives at dusk, the fuchsia pistels of the four o’ clocks
have already begun opening themselves up behind our small urban
apartment. We are both needed and the unnecessary. There are no
beginnings or endings to us; we were not there from the start and we
shall not finish together. This is a zero-sum race. All of our
pauses are pregnant in the silences we create around us. We are the
chords that change and change again.

-FIN. ~lchristopher, Wednesday Dec 17th, 2025; 4:29PM, Fort George, Manhattan NYC.