The odd thing about bathtubs in small apartments is that they are never deep enough to fold a body into and still be able to bury that body in pipe tanned water. Chris tried anyway. He curled himself into an ampersand of naked limb and raw bone, the water from the tap churning against his feet. The ampersand of being coiled harder, a cross section of a torsion bar pressing back the weight of carriage against the gaps in a road hidden well enough to take the most seasoned local driver by surprise. His head touched the pistachio green paste colored fiberglass at the tub's opposite end while the water, as hot as it could come, rippled inside his left nostril and lapped at his right. Both eyes stood open. One beneath the waves. One above. He could taste the salt of his day worn skin through the socket. The spikes and tines of the tang pricked the soft tissue behind his tongue like toothpicks to yellow cake. He made no effort to breath, allowing the natural drive for self preservation to tick his neck a few degrees this way to suck air, air still chunky with the scents of summer park greens and rain soaked tennis shoe soles left to dry, into his lungs. With one eye he watched the steam lap at the bathroom mirror. With the other eye he watched his breath bubble through and stick to the fiberglass of the tub wall in tiny, forgetful, silvered mercury spheres.
The trickle and blubber of water into water was joined by the thrush and hiss of water through a downspout. Skin drawn as tight as it can go over muscle dimples easily. Body builders take diuretics before competitions to produce the effect of forgetting to drink. Forgetting to eat. He opened his mouth and drank some of the hot water. The taste was not unbearable. He heard from someone at his job, someone who was more accustomed to rations and starvation and kneeling in sandy holes than splitting coffees at fast food joints in the titular hours of the morning after a night's eight hours, that if you drink hot water it can trick the stomach into believing it is full of chewed food. "How do you trick a mind into believing it is empty of chewed thought," he asked him that day. Chase laughed and shook his head. There was no joke. The gap glared like a newspaper swatted hound. In that gap there was too deep a glimpse at a thing they both knew existed. A thing they both wondered at in the small hungry hours of fingering dollar bills and counting days until the next pay cycle. He wanted to ask Chase if he ever killed anyone over there. "What was it like?"
Chris swallowed again. "An Easter egg. I am an Easter egg in a pool of dye and I am not dying," he considered. Hugging his knees to his chest, he realized, was not necessary. The slender width of the tub could hold his knees to his chin on it's own. He let go and, careful not to swish the half hot, half tub filling, water to the floor he wrestled his left arm from beneath his body weight and allowed it to rest in the few inches of space between his thighs and his stomach, like a cracked bone in a cheap blue sling. "What do you do with an Easter egg that will not take it's dye," he wondered, toes touching each other in conference. "You could eat it," he answered. "Boil it, maybe." His mind began to count the number of people that would be able to answer the question, the number of people he knew that would be willing to answer the question. "You would have to break it open of course, to see if the dye took on the inside." He considered for several seconds the principles of osmosis, deciding several neck twisted breaths later that high school was not worth revisiting for any length of time. There was no single piece of information locked up in those years worth searching for. His stomach tightened. Pressed his hips and his knees against the plastic tub wall and forced his spine against the opposite.
Chris listened to the drum roll of his vertebrae against the flex of plastic. The slow roll of knuckling pops knocked through the water to his submerged ear like fingers tapping against the thick clear plastic of a receptionist's desk. The knocks sounded like the weak fist of an aged man pounding against his own door in a blizzard. Locked out of his own home by his oversight. Frozen to death because he left without his keys. Never leave home without your keys the lolling, muted, dots of sound whispered to his left brain. His right heard nothing save the dribble tickle of air bubbles through water. He blinked, unsure for a moment that the pair of soft crushy spheres in his head were his own. They were. "I can't remember the last time I sat in the sea."
He shifted, a chain dangled bench on a summer night's planked porch touched by a breeze of thought. The water waved it's agreement. "I know you," the water said. "Where have you been?" Chris did not answer. He did not know how to answer. The water waved like a stranger to another stranger, half recognition, half courtesy, half hoping to be right, half too embarrassed to be wrong. The faucet was red in the face already. With splayed toes Chris reached the water softened palm of his foot to the heat of the hot water knob and cranked it gently until the burble and glass chute of falling water to water was superseded by the shush of falling water to crusted drain pipe. The tub was as full as it would ever be, and hot water came with a price tag only manageable when managed. And besides, the tongues of heat swathed everywhere along his still exposed skin where the tongues of water did not. "I am a continent," he thought, "kissing these waves of sea water. A continent rapping it's time gnawed knuckles against the heart of the Earth. Waiting for you," he blinked his water eye, "I have always been here."
"I know you."
"Can you feel me? Can you touch me," he thought"
"The way I used to?" The hiss quieted. The water was settling, cooling, to the ring of shedding that ran like a seam of skin along a scrotum. The steam on the bathroom mirror began to bead like sweat on the tip of a nose. Chris tucked his arm downward and in between his thighs. "Are you dying on the inside?"
"I don't know," he whispered and swallowed again. He tried to break himself open before. Once. Twice if his memory could serve him well enough to know a thing with certainty. He came apart then. Came apart like the pages in a book too old to be read, pages too furnace crisped to turn without flaking away like the ashes of a dream in the seconds after eyes snapped out from behind lids like roiling laughter from behind clenched teeth. He peeled then. A flower cut and destined for the press of paper weights for preservation and posterity, but left too long on a sun room's shelf and fractured between gripping fingers into a confetti of lost property and faded rainbow sliver dust. There was nothing left to know in the heap of scraps then. Nothing to study. To confirm or deny. His skin was beginning to prickle.
Pruning, Chris read somewhere, was actually sweat trapped beneath a layer of dead skin. Trapped beneath a layer of matter that used to function and whose only purpose, since ceasing to, was to protect the skin that still did. If you scratched at it hard enough, it could come off. If you had the fingernails for it. Geologist fingers. He squeezed his left forearm between his half submerged legs. It was still his arm there, still his hand and veins, still his limbs. "Are you going to fall asleep in me," the water asked?
"Like I used to," he moved in his cradle, the chunky air beginning to fall in brine brush strokes of chill and darkness. A streak of lightning touched the water and the light switch and sprinted away through the obscuring dappled film of the bathroom window. The afternoon hours were spent and dancing in evening streets, waiting for a bath of their own. He turned, a landmass farther from the sun, unbroken by the human touch of neither hand nor passage of foot. He kissed the waves. "I can try."
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