Counting Backwards

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“After a day in the operating room, do you think that surgeons dream of human insides?” I asked.

​

Lizzy and I were in bed, our covered bodies made mountains in the tired landscape of my beige bedding.

 

The smell of whiskey romanced me from the nightstand as if it were the only thing I had left.

 

"Why are you talking like that,” Lizzy asked, face blank, eyes averted.

 

Each of us on opposite sides of the bed, bodies no longer touching.

 

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for my whiskey.

 

Things were always like this after. Lizzy just shut down, like a power outage. Eyes glassy and unseeing, her body rigid  and un-moving, comforter pulled up over her breasts.

 

I could barely discern the rise and fall of her breath.

 

I imagined this it what she’d look like on the operating table: sedated and far away.

 

“How can surgeons come home and make love without thinking of internal organs and blood sloshing?” I continued, taking another drink.

 

“God,” Lizzy said, “what are you even talking about?”

 

In the window, the sun oozed the last of its fiery blood, abdicating, everything sinking.

 

“Let’s have a drink” I said. “I've got another bottle.”

 

“No, no,” Lizzy said, looking up, reading the ceiling as if discerning hieroglyphs in its texture. “I think you’ve already had enough,” she said with a sigh, turning her body away from me, looking at the wall.

 

“I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs to the floor.

 

“That’s your problem,” Lizzy said, “You haven’t had enough 'till you’ve had too much.”

 

I put on my boxers. “Let me just get that bottle,” I said.

 

The red numbers on my digital clock burned against the static of twilight.

​

A countdown,

my doomsday device.

​

“You know what,” Lizzy said, her voice like sand slipping through an hour glass, as if words were finite, as if we were running out of time.

​

“Hold on, let me get that bottle,” I said.

 

I shuffled into the kitchen and grabbed the fifth I had intended to save for Sunday.

 

“What were you saying, Lizzy,” I said , returning to the bedroom.

​

A porcelain doll in my bed, like those displayed in my grandmother's curio cabinet, something fragile, a human form.

 

“How about music?” I said. "Yes, yes, that's what we need, some music” I said.

 

I filled my cup generously before picking up my phone, connecting it to the speaker.

​

"No, I really need to go,” she said, sitting up, holding the comforter to her neck, covering her breasts as if her body had become a secret that I was no longer privy to.

 

"Name a song," I said, opening Spotify, standing next to the speaker. "Just let me get this set up."

 

“Oh shit, fuck,” Lizzy said.

 

I turned around, “What? Are you ok?” I asked. I'd never heard her curse before.

 

“My necklace,” Lizzy said, panic in her eyes. “My necklace!”

 

I watched her put her hand to her neck, creating a circuit of sensation:

 

Finger feeling throat.

Throat feeling finger.

 

Lizzy kicked the comforter aside, suddenly alert, vigilant and animated. She fastened her bra and stepped into her panties.

 

“Have you seen it? My cross?” She said, looking around wildly.

 

The room seemed to throb.

​

“We’ll find it,” I said, setting my phone down, pushing through the haze.

 

After flipping the light on, I began to sift through the bedding, an archeologist going layer by layer, hoping to unearth Lizzy’s religious artifact; her totem, her talisman, her tangible connection to a tenuous beyond.

 

“It’s a gold cross,” Lizzy said, getting down onto all fours in just her underwear, looking under the bed.

 

“Yes, a gold cross,” I repeated,

 

“Help me look,” she said, wildly,  genuine panic written on her face.

 

A gold cross, I kept repeating to myself as I buzzed around the room. A gold cross.

 

I thought about the electric chair, death by firing squad and lethal injection.

 

A gold cross.

 

I went into the kitchen, I went into the bathroom, I looked at my desk. I looked by the TV.

 

“When were you last wearing it?” I said, returning to the bedroom.

​

“I always wear it,” Lizzy said.

 

Even though Lizzy was now fully dressed: blouse, sweater, shoes and socks, she kept saying, "I feel naked without it."

 

"Check your nightstand,” she said.

 

And so I did, for the second time.

 

“It’s not here,” I said.

 

We stood on opposite sides of the bed, now, the bare mattress between us as if separated by an ancient land mass, a marauding desert, this lost tribe, our forgotten language.

 

“What do we do now,” Lizzy asked, her voice swirling, celestial like so many Nephilim.

 

A flickering martyr, a naysayer, Lizzy, my rapture trumpet wailing.

 

Her face was shadowed, my newly-painted blue walls seemed to breathe, pushing up into the foreground like hazy water rising, crowding around her facial features, swallowing her.

 

The dead groaned, the righteous went radiant, yawning, unburdened beneath a pristine sky.

 

We were underwater, now. Both of us.

 

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, finally.

 

Lizzy didn't seem well.

 

“Can I hold you?” I asked through fermented lips.

 

“I just need to breathe,” she said, sitting down on the bed, her back to me.

 

The air was fragrant with the burnt flesh of my offering.

 

This common human ache, shattered like clay tablets.

​

“I just need to breathe,” Lizzy said, standing and picking up her purse.

 

And like counting backwards on the operating table, breathing in anesthesia, we knew, that soon, there'd be nothing left.