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Bat's stories from the Brainchild Series
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by Bat
How the winter nights dominated her perception of the apartment. When Zola pictured it, she thought of the glaring light from the naked 150 watt bulbs, and how the overly-painted almost white walls showed the dirt that no one had ever cleaned. And the one wall with the lip prints. Dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of lip prints were scattered below a crayon & pastel drawing of Nuit, the Egyptian goddess, who was rendered there on the wall in her traditional pose: stretched over the world, stars on her body. Nuit was the sky. Zola was the one who drew her there one winter night for Jaegar.
Zola named the wall the Souvenir Wall as that was exactly what it was. The rest of the apartment was barren. There was no real furniture, no personality other than the wall. What she had once had, Zola had thrown out the window one winter night at 4:30 am after Rosemary had crazed her and had not let her sleep for days.
In the mosaic of moments that made up a person's existence, one could sort through the similar experiences, like flash cards, and file them under categories: Waiting At the Bus Stop, The First Euphoria of Love, Being Stoned, Making Spaghetti, Breaking Up. Shuffled and dealt, the cards -- like a poker hand -- became something else, something more popularly called life. Zola resented not being able to take all her cool cards off to some remote corner and revel in them at once while discarding the other ones. She wanted a straight flush. She felt like all she ever had was a Jack high.
It was easy to be philosophical while suffering through an experience. Her mind raced as her body went through the strange motions of stroking Jaegar's skin. Everyone had one of those experiences -- the last time one fucked a lover before breaking up for good -- and that was the aura of this experience. She hated it and tried at once to pay attention and to think of something, anything else. The sadness in the air startled her. This was it, wasn't it? The responses just weren't there, but they were trying anyway. He pulled her shirt off over her head and touched her breasts, breasts he'd once liked. Now? Who knew? Who cared? Zola knew she did and knew she didn't. She just wanted this to be over, but she couldn't find the strength to just get out of his bed and walk out the door. The scene had to be played to its finish -- and finish was what it was. Oh, maybe not. There was always that stray thought that kept saying maybe it would get better, but it hadn't in a long while, and his attentions lay elsewhere these days. It wasn't so much a mercy fuck as a "for old time's sake" fuck, and Zola found herself thinking she'd prefer a mercy fuck to that. Every touch was as if it was an attempt at a resuscitation that wasn't going to happen. Zola imagined an EKG machine above his bed, giving the readings as the doctors worked feverishly to revive the patient. She touched, he parried. He touched, she withdrew. She was seeing the emergency room in her mind's eye, applying CPR, trying to massage a heartbeat out of this. He put his tongue on her nipple, and she just saw the little machine in her mind register nothing, nothing, nothing. "He's dead, Jim," McCoy said in her mind. Yup, just dead. Neither of them spoke. It would have meant acknowledging the desolation they had staged. And the play went on for a long, long time. But they were unable to consummate their desolation, as even they had to recognize after a while that neither of them had become even remotely aroused despite the most heroic of efforts. Zola finally dressed and left. For good, she knew.
What was love anyway? It was one of those words, one of those emotions, that bore the best dissection while initially feeling it or while bitterly losing it. Transient, it laughed. Jaegar, when he had felt those initial stirrings of love for Zola, had in the dark of his apartment followed a dubious recipe disguised as a ritual to conjure an entity he charged with the sole task of making Zola think of him. He named the entity Rosemary, after the herb of remembrance. He set Rosemary loose and forgot about her.
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Zola walked into the cafe. It was the day after her metaphorical EKG had gone flat against the screen. She still felt that screech of nothingness. She felt torn open, exposed, but no one here knew that she'd lost something last night. Most of the people here were of the ilk that snorted at love, denied its existence, especially when they were feeling it. It took just one damaged relationship to turn most people into withering cowards. But, as the saying went, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Fuck that. Zola trusted the strength of coffee, a good old double latte. Something to make the heart go pitter-patter without involving another fallible soul. She was disappointed, as she always was when a romance withered, but she knew she'd get over that. She forced herself to smile coyly at a pretty long-haired boy who was staring musingly in her direction. He smiled back, and this little social triumph secured, she arranged herself at a table by herself where she had a clear view of him. She was already beginning to feel a little better. But after her first sip of coffee, she felt the bile of her inner fluids begin to rise up and she felt inexplicably torn apart. She'd been the one to walk out. She hadn't been happy either. What was this that stabbed at her? Something grabbed at her stomach and made her double over in pain. She resisted, but the feelings were stronger than Zola, propelling her to walk to the pay phone and call Jaegar, her fingers stabbing at the buttons on the phone in staccato fashion. She got his answering machine. She left a message. He never returned that call.
Zola screams in her sleep: Let go of me. Let go of me. Let go of me. Zola screams in her sleep.
In her barren apartment, in the winter cold, Zola stood by her open window and her steam radiator. She kept the window open because the radiator made the air stale, and she kept the radiator on because the open window made the apartment cold. Rosemary kept her company, perched on her inner ear today. Rosemary sang her songs today. Some Cure stuff, some NIN stuff, random snatches of lyrics that would remind Zola of Jaegar. Rosemary did a fair imitation of Robert Smith, Zola thought, but whining was so universal. Zola kissed the Souvenir Wall, leaving an imprint of a hue poetically called Black Orchid, the imprint just one of many other imprints each hue bearing its own distinctive and hyperbolic name. She'd mistaken the wall for Jaegar again, but she'd parted ways with Jaegar long ago and was left with this wall and Rosemary as the reward. She couldn't forget him. Rosemary saw to that. And had for years. Jaegar, in his initial enthusiasm, had effectively charged the entity, using the raw and dangerous energy of blind infatuation. But. Given that his dabblings in occult matters were less than skillful and his source books deficient, he managed to create an entity who continued its function long after it was needed. It was -- oh -- just a slight oversight on his part not to instruct Rosemary to banish after his purpose had been served, and the creature certainly wasn't going to go on its own. Jaegar's interest in Zola had long ago waned, but Rosemary's never would.
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