I practically tear the door off its hinges, slam it behind me, and breathe, because right then, in those thirty seconds, breathing is all I can think about. In and out and in and in and in, swallow the wind and the air and the whole fucking sterile scent that’s too common in hospitals, that reek that falls somewhere between death and medication and old men soiling themselves.
I chance a look back through the looking glass of room 218.
Ryan’s sitting on the bed with her, with Catherine, and the bandages around her head are drenched red with blood. Ryan’s sitting there, with this bleeding, crying Catherine and he’s holding her and he’s whispering to her and he’s doing all these things that I never could.
Ryan’s pulled her clock from his pocket, and I hadn’t even realised I’d lost it, he’s pulled out her clock and it’s still not fixed, but maybe it’s a little shinier, a little cleaner. Tickticktick, and Catherine slips it into the invisible pocket of her paper-nightgown.
Tick! goes the clock.
*
Dong! it goes, and it’s nine o’clock the morning after my film premiered, nine o’clock and Ryan and I are checking into this crappy little motel off the Vegas strip, five minutes from the hospital.
I try not to stab the receptionist with my ballpoint pen, when she asks for my autograph, when she asks for a photo, when she asks for a kiss.
“Room, room four,” she says, and she smiles up with crooked teeth and a smile that will get her nowhere in LA. Ryan grabs the key, smiles back with his own, a glimmering straight and narrow look at the perfection that LA regurgitates.
“Just for two days,” I mumble to Ryan. “Just till Catherine can get out. You don’t have to stay.”
“It’s fine,” Ryan says, runs his fingers against the wall as we walk by. “Great way to meet people, meet characters and scenarios. Good for writers.”
“Yeah,” I say, even if I have no idea what he just said. The night was too long and too dark and too frigid in every sense of the word. I’m just tired right now, just want to embrace the familiar, embrace sleep.
We get to the room, and it’s tiny, two single beds, a miniature television and a broken lamp in the corner. The curtains match the quilts on the bed match the wallpaper. Floral everything. I’m in a paddock, a greenhouse, a garden. Just, a really ugly one.
I crumple onto the bed, and my internal organs collapse in on themselves. F uck you, Brendon Urie, fuck you for making us work this hard tonight, last night, whatever.
Ryan falls onto the other bed, the one maybe a meter away from mine, his eyes quiver shut and his fingers rub at the bridge of his nose. “Brendon.”
“Yeah?”
“Catherine’s gonna be fine.”
“I know,” I say, and I close my eyes too, sleep isn’t close enough.
“Brendon,” Ryan sighs, long and deep. “Brendon, it probably isn’t my place to say-“
“Then don’t say it,” I state, coz I know what’s happening, I know what’s coming, and something’s bubbling in my intestines that I can’t quite push down.
“Brendon, she was raped and obviously beaten up, and you stormed in there, and you were…” He’s looking for the right word, my eyes are open and I can see his body shudder, his eyelids flicker. “You were mean. ”
Bubbling is getting higher, in my stomach now, rearing at the walls, fighting off the acids and enzymes that work there. “I said what I felt.”
“You were awful, Brendon. She called you. There were probably dozens of other people she could’ve called that were closer and easier and more convenient, but she called you. What does that say?”
It says that the people Catherine surrounds herself with are even less reliable than the people I surround myself with. “It says fuck all, Ryan.”
“It says a lot more than that.”
“What the fuck do you know anyway?” I’m sitting up now, I’m too awake, but I’m too tired, and Ryan has rolled over on the bed, left his back to me. “You come into the LA scene with some fucking concept for some indie-film, and suddenly you know everything about everyone. You know me, for what, a month, and suddenly you can criticize me and how I act. You know my sister for a night and suddenly you can defend her honour and hold her and be there for her.”
Ryan rolls over again, sits up too quickly, and stares at me with unblinking eyes. He’s too still here, too silent, his lips part though, a creaky window. “She needed you,” he whispers.
“And I came. ”
“Physically,” Ryan says, and he meets my eyes for maybe the first time that night, that day, half-hidden though, beneath hair and fringe and skin. “Not all needs are physical, not all tangible.”
And I’ve just had too much of this today, too much of Ryan and Catherine and just, all of it. “Fuck off, Ryan.”
“Jesus,” he says, “is this how the Urie’s deal with everything?”
“Just, fuck off, Ryan, seriously,” I say, fingers clench at my sides, and I’m standing up, have this desperate, urgent need to loom today, to be bigger and stronger and more aggressive.
“No,” he says, and he’s standing up too, “no, you need to talk to her, but you won’t, you won’t because you’re an asshole, Brendon. You’re an asshole and you’re afraid and you’re-“
And this is what I’ve been waiting for, this is what I’ve needed, this is my excuse. My fingers clench, and my fist draws back, and before I can even think to stop myself, my fingers collide with his cheekbone. Smash.
Bone slides against my knuckles like ill-fitting jigsaw pieces. It doesn’t fit and it’s forceful, and the edges of both fray a little, cardboard isn’t that tough. Ryan doesn’t fall back, so maybe he’s stronger than I give him credit for, maybe he’s not as breakable, but that look on his face, the wide eyes and the bruising cheek is enough to make my breathing heavier, less pleased than I should be.
“Right,” Ryan says, and his fingers graze across his cheekbone. “Right,” he says.
“Ryan…”
“Don’t worry about it, Brendon, don’t worry.”
“I-“
“I’ll fuck off, Brendon, don’t worry.”
“Wait.” His back’s turned to me again, he’s grabbing his car keys off the bed.
“Wait.” And I grab his arm, grab his wrist. “Wait.”
“No, Brendon,”
“Please, just-“
“ No, Brendon.” And he’s looking at me again, his eyes are glasses of water, plastic rain catchers. “Please don’t make me stay, don’t make me think less of you.”
“What?”
“Brendon,” he says, “Brendon, I don’t want to think of you like everyone else.”
My eyes flicker across his arm, it’s recoiling, twisting away from me, his eyes won’t meet mine again, and teeth catch his lip. “Just let me leave, Brendon.”
“Okay,” I say, and I let go of his arm, his wrist, and he picks up his keys, his wallet, and he packs himself away, folds up whatever pieces of him I’d been privy too, and this, this feels like the morning after we never had.
Ryan packs up his things, dresses his eyes, his lungs and his heart, covers it all up, takes it all away from where I’d maybe fucked it. He has everything he needs, and he runs his fingers through his hair, evens it out, smooths it all down; out of his pocket he pulls a pair of scissors, and every string I had seen the week before is clean cut, snipped and broken.
“G’bye,” he mumbles, and he leaves, strings draping off his back and his arms and his legs, collecting dust and insects and grime from the floor.
“Bye,” I say, and I finger the strings that fall off me. It’s probably awful, that all my mind dwells on, all I can think is that, hey, I don’t remember Alice hurting this bad.
Tick! goes the clock, the one that drapes from the floral wallpaper.
Chapter 13
Maybe it’s been a billion years since the solar system ruptured, writhed enough on its axis to pull a baby out of its loins, that space between the stars, the planets, the air. Maybe the baby was born deformed, oddly shaped and badly coloured, and maybe with a big, thick cord wrapped around its fat little neck. Maybe the solar system, maybe she gave birth to Earth, which would grow up a great, unattractive kid, before giving birth itself to something even more ugly, even more pink, even more retarded. Something that it would name Life.
It’s probably significantly less than that billion years since the human race sprung out of the arse of some over-evolved ape. But hey, human race, he’s a gorgeous little thing; manipulative, sure, but you can’t look like that, be as smart as that, be as two-legged as that, and not have your vices.
Earth, her vice, her obsession, it was leading people to believe she was the centre of the universe. It’s only when her kids hit puberty do they realise she wasn’t, isn’t. She also might have the hots for the sun, but it’s kinda hard to tell.
Humanity, maybe his vice is similar; pretty goddamn power-driven, authoritarian, dominant. He doesn’t want to be the centre of the universe, he wants to own it. Somewhere along the lines, somehow he kinda got thinking that world domination was a really fucking good idea and proceeded to create fucked up politicians and an even more fucked up media (and maybe I’m the poster child), coz really, that’s what runs the goddamn planet.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, that this human race, this humanity, somewhere along the lines, it started evolving all on its own.
It started breaking away, falling apart, and maybe, maybe it broke in three. It wasn’t a series of life form’s anymore, content to grunt and beat and kill their prey with the rugged side of a tree trunk. It had evolved.
Suddenly, we’re in a world of three different sorts of human beings. Three species of humanity. Two creatures broke away from the original, three then, three species, unique all on their own. Two beings that have fucked everything over for the original.
There are three of them, Men, Women and Catherine Fucking Urie.
“Where are we going?”
I look over my shoulder just long enough to see her there, looking smaller than I ever remembered, in her faded jeans and too-big t-shirt. Looking tiny, diminutive and maybe kinda pathetic with the way the dark rings beneath her eyes attempt to take over her face, the way her body quivers with the non-existent breeze, the way that space on her chest, the one that used to have, well, breasts, is just not there anymore.
Her chest, it’s concave, her breasts are going the wrong way, but it’s not that, it’s just, all I can think, all I can see is some drug dealer, flippant and high, he’s dug angry hands into her chest, pulled out her femininity, her dignity, her self-respect.
“I’m going back to Los Angeles.”
“Oh,” she says, screws up her face and draws circles in the dirt with the toe of her old shoe. “Where am I going?”
“Rehab,” I reply, and I haven’t booked her in yet, wish I had, wish I’d thought ahead enough, only everything’s been sorta slow motion without Ryan’s omnipresence.
“Why would I go there?” she says, and really, she seems genuinely confused. Fucking curious, oblivious, moronic.
“Maybe coz you’re a fucking drug addict?” I ask, and almost tear open the boot of my car, rip its top off. “I dunno.”
“I’m not a drug addict, Brendon!” And she’s serious. There are walls in her eyes that I haven’t seen in years. No fire, no storm, just layers and layers of solid brick that fake immunity to the fungus and the algae that creep up their sides. “I’m not, I just…” she hesitates, draws breath, and all I see is cracks. “…I like to feel good every now and then.”
I heave out a sigh, grasp her suitcase (old and floral, it was one of mum’s) too firmly in my hands, throw it into the trunk of the car. “So do I, Cath, but I’m not shooting up to do it!”
“You snort it? Smoke it? Drink it? There’s not much of a fucking difference.”
And okay, that might sorta piss me off. I slam the boot too quickly, and my feet on the ground, they’re heavy and angry and just, loud. She backs away when I get too close to her, her face screws up, and she’s fighting, even years apart I can see that much, she’s fighting not to close her eyes. Fighting not to shake. I don’t want her to be scared of me, but I want her to know that I hate her for fucking everything up. “You can tell me that when you have to drag my bleeding ass out of a fucking gutter, okay?”
She glares, all angry brown eyes and sneering lips, defending the chinks in her walls like Ryan protects his concept, protects his insides. It’s all venom, all offensive. “Like you give a damn.”
“Like I don’t.”
Catherine, she’s the last of her kind, so I resist attacking her jugular, even when it’s on show.
*
Los Angeles is roughly a four hour drive from Las Vegas.
This is four hours of two very different species being locked in an enclosed environment without a watchful observer with a taser.
Fuck, I wish I had a taser.
“Were the two of you a couple?” And she says it so out of the blue that I might swerve a little on the road, play suicidal chicken with a passing truck.
The pupils, the black blobs in my eyeballs, they dart around like they want to escape, roll away from me, down the road to be crushed by some Volkswagen with a family of nineteen crowded away. Splat. “What the fuck, Catherine?”
“You two,” she says, rolls her eyes and taps her long fingers on the dashboard. “You and Ryan, were the two of you together?”
“No,” I say, “no, he works for me, or…or I work for him, it’s always hard to tell. He’s writing a feature-film script that I’m going to star in.”
“Oh,” she says, and her forehead furrows, her lips purse. I can see the bones in her thighs shift beneath the material of her jeans, can see them clink and cut and rub, and Christ, she’s thin. “Why did he come with you then?”
“I don’t know,”
“Yes, you do.”
“Catherine.” And I sigh, rub my fingers across the steering wheel, the sweat, it makes them stick. “He’s some asshole-kid with a bucket load of talent. We’re colleagues, we are not friends, and even if you still live in the land of Cinderella and…and I dunno, fucking Alice in Wonderland, I don’t. We were not a couple.”
“Okay,” Catherine shrugs, raises her eyebrows so far on her forehead that they disappear beneath her wayward fringe. She holds up her hands in some sort of disbelieving defeat. “Okay.”
“Right.”
“I think he could’ve been in love with you.”
This time I do swerve, almost hit some Honda Civic with a twelve-year-old in the back seat. The sound of horns and wayward tyres ring in my ears. “For fuck’s sake, Catherine!”
“No, I’m serious,” she says, smiles through her teeth, those decaying things that excrete marijuana smoke when they think no one can see.
I pause, stare at her through the mirror. “Serious?”
“Deadly.”
And she is, she’s quiet and misty-eyed and she’s staring at the road in front of us with the barest of grins. “I think he could’ve been in love with you.”
“Too bad,” I say, and talk about topping your lists of regret, “I don’t love him.”
Catherine sighs, long and deep, in through her nostrils, out through her tear ducts. “I know you don’t,” she says. “You don’t love anyone.”
“Catherine…” I can feel my breath on my fingers, can feel fists forming around the wheel. My eyes roll skyward and so do my hopes. I do love. I do.
“You can’t.”
“What?”
“You can’t love him,” she says, and she won’t look at me, won’t look at anything other than her fingers as she fiddles with her charm bracelet. “You couldn’t love mum and you couldn’t…” She lets her eyes slide shut, lets the hair fall across the side of her face so that I, I can’t see her. “You can’t love me. ”
“Catherine…”
But she’s right, I can’t, and I hate myself for it more with every shortened breath I hear, with every muffled sob that echoes through the hollow core of the car like the steps of the director in a C-grade horror-flick.
I can’t say anything, and so I don’t.
*
“I need you to book Catherine into a clinic.” And I say it too quickly, readjust the edges of my t-shirt with overeager fingertips. “A rehab centre.”
Loretta stares at me with wide eyes, hair pulled off her face and glasses that reflect the blinding light of some thousand-dollar light bulb. “Who the fuck is Catherine?”
“My sister,” I say, and my fingers are off my shirt in a matter of seconds, quickly laced in the hair on the back of my head, a clenched fist. “Catherine’s my sister.”
“You’re an only child, Brendon.” But she’s not sure, not as adamant as she normally is. Her forehead’s furrowed, and there’s something about her eyes that I just can’t read.
“I lied.”
“Fuck,” she says, and her fingers are up beneath the frames of her glasses, she’s rubbing at her eyelids. “Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. ”
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”
Loretta slams her fists on the desk, and her eyes, they’re as bright as they ever were, a furnace at the holocaust. “Brendon, if the press gets a hold of this-“
“They won’t,” I reply, “Catherine sure as hell won’t say anything, you won’t, I won’t, Ryan won’t.”
“ Ryan knows about this?” The walls here are bleach white, and her face, it’s a chameleon in itself, blends perfectly into the backdrop. “Anyone else?”
“No,” I say, “well, Jon, and a few doctors back in Las Vegas, but-“
“Jesus, when Jon told me you had a decent reason for missing the premiere…but…just, for fuck’s sake, Brendon!”
“There was nothing I could do, Loretta.”
At this stage of my life, I had been into Loretta’s office a grand total of three times. One was when she signed me, the second was to toast at the end of our first film together and the third was now. This, I believe, totally justifies me never realising how many fucking awards and diplomas she had.
She had fourteen right here, at this stage of her life.
Now, a million years later, now she has forty-eight.
“What’s happening with Ryan, then?”
“What about him?”
“Well,” she says, and her eyes are wide, she stares up at me over the top of those thick-rimmed glasses. She looks like my third grade math teacher all of a sudden, only, you know, young. “Ryan Ross,” she says, “for one, now has dirt on you. Secondly, well, it was a date-thing wasn’t it?”
“What?” I can feel my face, like, elongate. My jaw drop, and my eyebrows disappear somewhere into my hairline.
“You and Ross, you fucked and then, judging by your expression, you fucked up what could have become white-picket-fence.”
“We didn’t fuck, Loretta.”
“What then?” And she’s smiling through a set of paper-white teeth, her eyes, they’re smiling too. “You made love?” She air quotes, and that in itself is just wrong. But, maybe, well, it’s the in-between thing, isn’t it? It’s that ocean between two landmarks, between two names. It sure as hell wasn’t making love, but, but it wasn’t just fucking either.
“We had a fight,” I say, run hands down my thighs. “About Catherine, and then he left, and then I didn’t care.”
Loretta, her eyes widen even further, her mouth draws a thin line across her paper-teeth, and her forehead, kinda outta the blue, furrows down her face. “Jesus fucking Christ, are all guys like this?”
“Like what?” I ask, before I can stop myself. I should know better, given that this is fucking Loretta.
She lets loose a sigh, a big, deliberately dramatic thing, and puts away a billion folders into angry looking desk drawers. “Like, on an eternal quest to find out whose cock’s bigger?”
My jaw drops. “That’s not what we’re arguing about!”
“Aw,” she says, pouts big lips at me, and lets her features fall upwards into a Myspace face. Every raging stereotype that some fucking retarded, slaggy teenage girls create when pretending to slit their wrists online. A ‘sad’ face. “Who can connect with the druggie sister better?”
And flash, the painter’s there to strip away the internet-look, the one for faux photography, to give her back the regular blank looks and blatant cynicism. “It’s the same bullshit, Bren, and it’s boring. For fuck’s sake, if you want I can get you both in a room together and dish out a couple of rulers. Is that what you want? Will this help, because for the love of God, Brendon Urie-”
“I swear, Loretta,” I say, and I fist the waist of my jeans, “it’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like, Brendon?” And she’s staring, with big, dark eyes, and flaring nostrils. She’s pissed off, and she’s busy and she’s just, she’s herself. “I may be a woman, but unfortunately I am not a mind reader.”
“It’s…he’s not…I don’t know,” I say, shrug, and it’s true, coz I don’t know.
I don’t know anything these days.
But Loretta, she does, because there are seconds of pause, seconds of a blank face with ever-widening eyes, and Loretta, she looks like a rabbit, moments after being shot in the gut.
“Ah,” Loretta says, and she knows something that I don’t, she’s clicked, and she’s right, she’s not a mind reader, but she is a woman, and they have too many instincts, their intuition is too in-tune. Unfortunately, this is not something that they chose to bear to the less aware species, like men, or Catherine.
“Ah,” Loretta says again, and she’s frowning now, her forehead furrowed, “wasn’t really expecting this turn of events, but hey, whatever.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Gimme the fucking phone, Urie, and I’ll get your sister into a clinic.”
The female species is the most diverse of the three. Maybe. Maybe definitely.
Loretta, she’s on one end of a bitterly large spectrum and Audrey, she’s on the other. Audrey, with her hair extensions and her nose rings and that resounding innocence that she doesn’t even know she has. That naivety that drips out of her eyes and her lips like tears and vomit, even when she’s being a slut.
She’s not a lot like Loretta, not really, not at all. As embryos they wandered over to the womb-GP, that pharmacy of the body, were prescribed one set of female-reproductive organs, two-tits, two brown eyes and 300 milligrams of bitchiness. The rest, they got it somewhere else.
Loretta says university has an influence.
She says having a brain does too.
But tonight, when I’m heavy and exhausted and weighted down by the glaring suitcases of a thousand people, tonight Audrey is just what I need.
She’s at one of William’s parties.
“Audrey,” I say, “Audrey.”
“In a minute, Bren.” And she’s looking small tonight, but so, so much bigger than Catherine. She’s decked out in a black skirt that hugs her hips like cling-wrap, a low cut top that might emphasise her flat chest more than she wants it too. Her hair, it’s blonde tonight, with tinges of black, pink and orange. She’s wearing her heart on the bangles around her wrist; she doesn’t notice it dripping blood all over the floor, all over her bare thighs.
My teeth latch onto her neck, and she giggles like no one else. Giggles enough, loudly enough, drunkenly enough that where I am, what I’m doing, it’s a slap in the face.
What am I doing?
Audrey turns around in my arms, her body pressed tight against me, eyes smiling, alcohol dripping off her tongue, her breath. “Horny bastard.”
“I try.”
“Come on then,” she says, wraps one arm, the one with the bangles, the one with her heart on it, she wraps it around my neck. My face might screw up when the blood dripdripdrips its way down my shirt.
We stumble upstairs into one of the bedrooms and I collapse onto the bed before I can stop myself.
“Blow me?”
“Ngh,” she says, and she staggers over, crumples on top of me like a wavering pillar of forgotten strength. “Not now, I just wanna…let’s make out of something. I dunno.”
“Audrey,” I say, “Audrey, I need it.”
She reaches a hand down to the front of my jeans, gropes a little too hard. Her fake nails dig into the top of my thighs. “You’re not even hard.”
Aren’t I?
She shifts on top of me, grinds into me, and no, I’m not. Not even remotely aroused, and Jesus Christ, why the fuck not?
“Make me, then.”
She’s staring at me, as if she’s catching onto something that I can’t see, can’t hear or taste or touch, but she leans down anyway, pulls up my shirt and kisses my chest, the skin that stretches across my ribs, my lungs, my stomach. She unzips my fly like a three-dollar illiterate Mexican whore. Kisses my crotch through my underwear, my thighs, my hip bones and it’s just, okay, I’m not…nothing’s happening.
“Right,” she says, and her voice is maybe a little shakier than she intends. She leans up, collapses back over my chest, “so who is she?”
“What?”
“Well,” she says, and she doesn’t even notice the way she’s suddenly clutching her heart in both hands, the way her nails dig in a little more desperately, the way the blood trickles over her pale fingers. “Either I’m losing my touch or you’re in love, and I know it isn’t the former.”
“There isn’t anyone, Audrey.” And I shove her off, push my shirt down and do up my fly. I can’t meet her eyes, and I have no fucking idea what she’s talking about.
“The latter then.” Her eyes are glassy, they waver and shiver, and she’s holding her heart together, trying to hide the cracks from me, but she never, we…we were never together, so why is this hurting so much?
“No, there’s not…” I start, but my body feels too resigned, too exhausted, because I’m gonna go home tonight to Catherine asleep on my sofa, Jon watching TV and no one to fucking talk to. No one to vent it all out on.
“A couple of months ago there were pictures in like, every magazine,” she starts, and she’s choosing her words very carefully for someone so utterly trashed. “You and this guy…”
“Wh-Ryan?” I ask, and my disbelief must be evident on my face, but that, that should be all she sees. She can’t see my heart like I see hers, she can’t see it tighten and constrict and maybe start beating a mile a minute, can’t see it get caught across my ribcage, can’t see it shake and quiver and tangle in my lungs.
“Ryan,” she says, and she’s pushed her own heart so close to her chest, is holding it there so tight that the blood smears across her shirt. “Ryan,” she says again, and that sky that hides behind her irises, it clouds over and just starts, well, she’s crying.
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