Free Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

were drinking in only your own recycled air. And Robin and Jaelin brought me back to that open fright with the unimportant objects.
    He came here and placed my past and future on this table like a road.
    This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. The heat incredible, we go out and buy a bag of ice, crack it small in our mouths and spit it onto each other’s bodies, her tongue slipping it under the skin of my cock me pushing it into her hot red fold. But we are already travelling on the morning bus tragic. Like the ice melting in the heat of us. Dripping wet on our chest and breasts we approach each other private and selfish and cold in the September heatwave. We give each other a performance, the wound of ice. We imagine audiences and the audiences are each other again and again in the future. ‘We’ll go crazy without each other you know.’ The one lonely sentence, her voice against my hand as if to stop her saying it. We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.
    Morning. Water has dried tight on my chest and stomach. I wake up crucified on my back in this bed. There is no need to turn. Blue cloud light in the room. There is no need to turn my head for Robin is gone. Already my body has unbuckled out into the space she left. Bending my left hand over my body and then crashing it down as hard as I can on her half of the bed. And it bounces against the sheet. And as I knew, she’s gone.

He went to Webb’s cottage on Lake Pontchartrain on a bus. His hands dead on his thighs and his body leaning against the window, the wet weather outside and this woman on his right in the dark dress who smiled as she took the seat, scribbling something on paper that she is hunched over. Her legs twitching now and then as if her brain is there.
    He tried to take in the smell of her. The taste of her mouth in the next hotel room they passed along the road. He knew the shape of her body. As she would stand in front of him, the small breasts cold in the room, the heart of her. He went with her for months into the relationship, awkward first fights, the slow true intimacy, disintegration after they exchanged personalities and mannerisms, the growing tired of each other’s speed. All this before they went one more mile—as she wrote on and he thought on into the heart and mind of her, not even glancing at her as she got off alone at Milneburg for she was an old friendship now and he could guess the expressions, her face for all the moments. Accidental lust on the bus carrying her new into his dead brain so even months later, years later, pieces of her body and character returned. What he wanted was cruel, pure relationship.

Got here this afternoon. Walk around remembering you from the objects I find. Books, pictures on the wall, nail holes in the ceiling where you’ve hung your magnets, seed packets on the shelf above the sink—the skin you shed when you finish your vacations. Re-smell your character.
    Not enough blankets here, Webb, and it’s cold. Found an old hunting jacket. I sleep against its cloth full of hunter sweat, aroma of cartridges. I went to bed as soon as I arrived and am awake now after midnight. Scratch of suicide at the side of my brain.
    Our friendship had nothing accidental did it. Even at the start you set out to breed me into something better. Which you did. You removed my immaturity at just the right time and saved me a lot of energy and I sped away happy and alone in a new town away from you, and now you produce a leash, curl the leather round and round your fist, and walk straight into me. And you pull me home. Like those breeders of bull terriers in the Storyville pits who can prove anything of their creatures, can prove how determined their dogs are by setting them onto an animal and while the jaws clamp