Incubus

Incubus

by Craig Arnold

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs

on the peg over hers, and he's inside.   

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,   

buys herself a minute looking for two   

matching cups for the lime-flower tea,   

not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves   

and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.   

She talks a wall around her, twists the string   

tighter around the tea bag in her spoon.   

But every conversation has to break   

somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa   

he sits, warming his hands around the cup   

he hasn't tasted yet, and listens on   

with such an exasperating show of patience   

it's almost a relief to hear him ask it:   

If you're not using your body right now

maybe you'd let me borrow it for a while?

It isn't what you're thinking. No, it's worse.   

Why on earth did she find him so attractive   

the first time she met him, propping the wall   

at an awkward party, clearly trying to drink   

himself into some sort of conversation?   

Was it the dark uncomfortable reserve   

she took upon herself to tease him out of,   

asking, Are you a vampire? That depends,   

he stammered, are you a virgin? No, not funny,   

but why did she laugh at him? What made her think   

that he needed her, that she could teach him something?   

Why did she let him believe she was drunk   

and needed a ride home? Why did she let him   

take her shirt off, fumble around a bit   

on the spare futon, passing back and forth   

the warm breath of a half-hearted kiss   

they kept falling asleep in the middle of?   

And when he asked her, why did she not object?   

I'd like to try something. I need you to trust me.   

Younger and given to daydreams, she imagined   

trading bodies with someone, a best friend,   

the boy she had a crush on. But the fact   

was more fantastic, a fairy-tale adventure   

where the wolf wins, and hides in the girl's red hood.   

How it happens she doesn't really remember,   

drifting off with a vague sense of being   

drawn out through a single point of her skin,   

like a bedsheet threaded through a needle's eye,

and bundled into a body that must be his.   

Sometimes she startles, as on the verge of sleep   

you can feel yourself fall backward over a brink,   

and snaps her eyelids open, to catch herself   

slipping out of the bed, her legs swinging   

over the edge, and feels the sudden sick   

split-screen impression of being for a second   

both she and her.   

                              What he does with her   

while she's asleep, she never really knows,   

flickers, only, conducted back in dreams:   

Walking in neighborhoods she doesn't know   

and wouldn't go to, overpasses, ragweed,   

cars dry-docked on cinderblocks, wolf-whistles,   

wanting to run away and yet her steps   

planted sure and defiant. Performing tasks   

too odd to recognize and too mundane   

to have made up, like fixing a green salad   

with the sunflower seeds and peppers that she hates,   

pouring on twice the oil and vinegar   

that she would like, and being unable to stop.   

Her hands feel but are somehow not her own,   

running over the racks of stacked fabric   

in a clothing store, stroking the slick silk,   

teased cotton and polar fleece, as if her fingers   

each were a tongue tasting the knits and weaves.   

Harmless enough.   

                              It's what she doesn't dream   

that scares her, panic she can't account for, faces   

familiar but not known, déjà vu   

making a mess of memory, coming to   

with a fresh love-bite on her left breast   

and the aftershock of granting another's flesh,   

of having gripped, slipped in and fluttered tender   

mmm, unbraided, and spent the whole slow day   

clutching her thighs to keep the chafe from fading,   

and furious at being joyful, less   

at the violation, less the danger, than the sense   

he'd taken her enjoyment for his own.   

That was the time before, the time she swore   

would be the last—returning to her senses,   

she'd grabbed his throat and hit him around the face   

and threw him out, and sat there on the floor   

shaking. She hadn't known how hard it was   

to throw a punch without pulling it back.   

Now, as they sit together on her couch   

with the liquid cooling in the stained chipped cups   

that would never match, no matter how hard   

she stared at them, he seems the same as ever,   

a quiet clumsy self-effacing ghost   

with the gray-circled eyes that she once wanted   

so badly to defy, that seemed to see her   

seeing him—and she has to admit, she's missed him.   

Why? She scrolls back through their conversations,   

searching for any reason not to hate him.   

She'd ask him, What's it like being a girl   

when you're not a girl? His answers, when he gave them,   

weren't helpful, so evasively poetic:   

It's like a sponge somebody else is squeezing.

A radio tuned to all stations at once.

Like having skin that's softer but more thick.

Then she remembers the morning she awoke   

with the smear of tears still raw across her cheeks   

and the spent feeling of having cried herself   

down to the bottom of something. Why was I crying?   

she asked, and he looked back blankly, with that little   

curve of a lip that served him for a smile.   

Because I can't.

                              And that would be their secret.   

The power to feel another appetite   

pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold   

lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke,   

fill her and then be stilled. The freedom to fall   

asleep behind the blinds of his dark body   

and wake cleanly. And when she swings her legs   

over the edge of the bed, to trust her feet   

to hit the carpet, and know as not before   

how she never quite trusted the floor   

to be there, no, not since she was a girl   

first learning to swim, hugging her skinny   

breastless body close to the pool-gutter,   

skirting along the dark and darker blue   

of the bottom dropping out—

                              Now she can stand,   

and take the cup out of his giving hand,   

and feel what they have learned inside each other   

fair and enough, and not without a kind   

of satisfaction, that she can put her foot   

down, clear to the bottom of desire,   

and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.