Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 6.

Lana's interlude.

How about a break from that Marshall guy? Lana’s taking over today.

Chapter 6. Lana’s interlude.

Terry’s fingers buried deep inside of her vagina feel like next to nothing where nothing is high up on a shelf and unreachable. She moans like it matters but her pleasure has little to do with what is happening and they’re both fine with this. When Lana cums, she lifts her hips into the air and wiggles like she is experiencing orgasm and not just a slight tickle in her gut. Terry’s face is wet and grinning when she emerges above Lana’s pelvis. Her broad jawbone had fit well between her thighs and Lana would have preferred to just sleep like that with Terry’s fat head being squeezed by her thin and brittle bones like a sort of pillow. Terry kisses the lips of her vagina and Lana smiles like the intimacy moves her. She is not impatient though. She lets Terry do what Terry has agreed to and when Terry is done, she takes the little white bag from her pocket and the powder inside seemingly falls upwards into Lana’s nose and her brain is fuzzy with life like the static off an old TV.

Terry does not care about Lana. She just wanted to eat some pussy and Lana just wanted some oblivion. Now that it is wriggling through her veins again and filling her with that dull purity, Lana smiles a real contented smile and Terry leaves her there in the grass with all the night bugs and the emptiness that comes with being full of something quiet. 

Lana laughs at the sky. With her erratic eyes she can trace out a constellation that looks like a penis pointed at a butthole. Sometimes she wishes she had a penis too. Nothing to do with gender, she just thinks that Marshall would love her more if she had a penis. Lots of people have loved her for her vagina–it’s a useful one–but the feeling isn’t the same. She can just tell that Marshall knows how to throw it back on a dick. And if he loved her then she wouldn’t have to keep filling her bed with strangers or her veins with cold ocean water, though this is an excuse like everything else.

The grass is cold against Lana’s bare thighs. She fumbles around in the pocket of her dress for a loose cigarette and lights it against her lips.

“Bored,” she mutters through the smoke.

Up on her feet, the edges of her vision shimmer. She hasn’t seen Marshall or Jamie in hours. Where could those little gay boys be? She hopes they’re having gay sex and she hopes they will let her watch.

There are well over one hundred people in Lana’s house. The music is too loud and everyone is high in the wrong way, sinking into couches or slumping over in crooked shapes on their feet. Some guy took over the music while she was getting eaten out so she whispers in his ear, meet me in the bathroom and when he walks away looking like he’s won the lottery she puts on some grating pop music made by skinny trans women. The beat is throbbing and erratic. The vocals are diluted through a thousand filters and sped up like running into traffic. It sounds like sexual euphoria and feels like freedom. Lana pounds her dirty bare feet into the torn up hardwood floors, her lace skirt spinning and folding and unfurling all around her. She dances in the center of the living room, hair falling across her face in waves of blurred movement. She is laughing but the matter is very serious to her. If people do not start to move their bodies in the next few minutes she might do something terrible. 

Why doesn’t the world crave movement the way she does? How can anyone ever slow down without sinking into the tar pit of the soul?

A small, weaselly looking man joins her, too close with his sweaty rat-like body. He skips the pretense of touching the shoulder or the small of the back and digs his grimy fingers into the sallow flesh on her ass. She doesn’t mind. Whatever it takes to get the world up to her speed and anyway all the little weasel gets is a handful of sexless tailbone.

She elbows the guy in the gut ‘by accident’ but he’s clutched onto her pretty tight. A few other people join their offbeat stomping of feet and jostling of limbs. If Lana stops moving, she might collapse.

Lana knows she is a very interesting person. When she was six years old, she liked to build really elaborate and intricate statues out of her Legos. They were usually women and they were often the size of her toddler body. The Statue of Liberty, the Greek goddess Athena. Tyra Banks. The only person who ever showed any interest in her talent was this weird uncle who might not have been related to her in hindsight. He was the sort of goatee-sprouting uncle who insisted his entire existence was dependent on his support of ‘the troops.’ He told Lana if she made a life sized Lego statue of an American soldier, he would show her something ‘even more fun than Legos.’ Her Lego set was promptly boxed up and donated to the Goodwill.

When Lana was nine years old she got really into karate. She was the only girl in her class and she was better than all of the boys but mostly because they were always moving in predictable ways trying to touch her flat chest or bony butt so they were easy to beat. Only, the stronger she got, the more competitions she won, the more eyes she found prying at the seams of her skin for a closer look. She got her black belt by the time she was ten and then quit when it became obvious that she couldn’t kick her way out of being a woman.

When Lana was fifteen, she wrote a book, an impressive one. It was deeply fantastical, a thoroughly thought out world with a plot so original and intriguing it got her mother off of drugs for the day that she spent reading it. The next C.S. Lewis! her mother decided. She became convinced that this book was their path out of poverty and so she tried manically to sell it and every day publishers would call the house leaving lengthy messages about how badly they wanted to turn her into a teenage prodigy and it became too overwhelming when really she’d written it for no one but herself and so she burned it out back and her mother hated her after that.

Turning to drugs was the next logical step toward burying these peculiarities of personality that seemed to draw needy, grabbing people into her orbit. Passed down like a family heirloom, her father was invested, if not excited, in teaching Lana the ins and outs of diluting the self into something simple and uncomplicated through powders and vaporized sludge. Nothing interested her as much as the disinterest that drugs filled her with. By sixteen, the drugs were as essential and inextricable as the blood trudging through her veins. The drugs keep things straightforward and predictable. Every step forward is in the direction of the next hit, every plan revolves around where to get some coke, who to fuck for heroin, when her father was making deliveries so she could steal shit from his bag. None of this has brought her any closer to happiness or farther from womanhood but it’s all so much easier, isn’t it? If the passion is always going to end up crushed beneath the boots of insatiable men, it’s best to give into the cold, steady flow of vacant need. It’s easier to let each day pass by like a distant dream than to feel all of the things she can never act on.

So this guy touching her grossly at her own party is whatever. He’s just another man taking as much as he can grab with two hands and in the end he’s probably the one walking away feeling more empty than before. Lana holds everything she can remember and does not let it go. Still, when he tries to finger her, she does punch him in the face and her knuckles split open and he bleeds when his head cracks against the floor.

One of his gross friends steps in to help him out and she flees. The movement is too much, the lights and the sounds too bright and she asked for it but she can rarely handle all that she wants. So she goes down to the basement and sits in the damp darkness, the concrete floor a salve to her hot head. She lies flat on the floor and looks up through the gaps in the wood floors above. There’s no ceiling, only rotting wood between the people above and the woman below. From so far down beneath it all, the people are easier to hear, the lights not so penetrating.

She presses her cracked knuckles against the cold stone. Her blood hardens.

When Lana’s father died, when he shot a hole in his own head to get rid of some of the excess, his body sat alone at the kitchen table for a long time and most of his blood spilled through the cracks in the floor and pooled in the basement. It’s still down here somewhere, thick and hard and brown. She couldn’t bring herself to clean it up, not even while high and she never understood why because she wanted him to die and she wanted every trace of him erased from her life. She hasn’t said his name in eight years. But she left him down here, it seemed like maybe this was where he wanted to be.

Lana’s mother is out there somewhere living a lower class American life and probably watching a lot of television and eating Doritos. She taught Lana a lot about being a woman. Things like silence and having tits and being receptive when a man tells you he has something that can fill you up. There’s little ill will toward her mother though she really was not a good mother. Lana knows how easy it is to be good at things like building statues and writing books and to still find loving another person an impossible feat.

Off the floor, she staggers back up the stairs. Someone offers her a pipe and she takes a hit. Out on the front porch, a guy is laying on the steps and staring at the stars and pissing his pants. She flashes her tits at him but his eyes are locked firmly on the heavens. 

“I’ll have what she’s having,” she says to herself.

Lana can’t remember why she came outside. In the kitchen, a girl with wide hips puts a tab of something on her tongue and then they make out for a while. This girl is being handsy too but she’s a girl so there’s less violence behind it and Lana lets it happen. The girl makes her cum without taking off any of her clothes and it feels like nothing more than a slight pinching sensation. Is there ever going to be anything more?

Up the stairs, there’s been an orgy going on in her room for a while so she sits in the corner and watches that and teases her nipples with idling fingers. It all looks rather simple from the outside. It’s all just sliding skin and swinging genitals and performed moans. They look like a Baroque painting in overwhelming detail, these strangers fucking each other and exchanging their fluids and looking for deeper breath in closeness. Throbbing like the earth.

When it gets boring, she crawls under her bed and listens to the bed squeak above her and it goes on and on and no one seems to be able to cum and bring it all to an end. Wiggling around on the dusty floor, she comes across a pair of underwear. Marshall’s boxer briefs that he left the week before. She puts her face in the crotch and they hold lots of boy smells like musk and piss and anger and cheap body wash and patricidal tendencies. She pulls them close and curls herself into a ball and sleeps for a while.

---

The orgy is still going when she wakes and there’s a tightness in her gut that draws a sharp groan from her dry throat. She tucks Marshall’s underwear in the drawer of her nightstand. Residual coke on the uneven surface, up her nose like a cow ripped from the earth by a UFO’s tractor beam. 

In the kitchen, she drinks down a large glass of water. Her stomach wrenches at the lack of food in her stomach. She can actually feel her stomach twisting into literal knots, bending all about itself to tell her that she is empty. The pain is immense and so she finds this guy–Barry? Harry? Kevin?–and he gives her a pill to cast the hurt out. 

The pill is the thing that does her in. She didn’t ask what it was but it provided relief for a few minutes if time is any relief at all. And then it all comes rushing back in. She knows she’s made a mistake but it’s buried beneath layers and layers of drugs fighting to provide the fuzziest filter to hang across her vision. The kitchen becomes the ceiling or she becomes the floor. The walls spin like children. Is she outside? The night sky and the towering bonfire are reaching toward one another. The disorientation turns Lana’s legs into stilts. She thinks she might be a flamingo. She’s definitely housing some sort of parasite in her gut and it’s tearing apart the lining of her stomach.

“Does God feel pain?” she asks. 

A pair of eyes are searching hers suddenly. Dark in the center, a void with gravity.

“Man, that’s a big question,” a man’s voice says. The mouth it comes from is below the eyes, which is normal.

“It’s not so big,” Lana explains. “I feel pain and I’m a god.”

The man is looking for that giving nature in her eyes, he’s looking for the signs of a woman who will do anything. “What kind of god are you?”

A short moment launches Lana back into her body and she feels a cold smoothness against her thighs, something plasticky between her fingers. She’s in the bathtub of the upstairs bathroom with the guy who tried to finger her on the dance floor. Her eyes adjust like a camera lens and his weasel face is shifting and distant but she can see the bandage on his forehead in the place where his head cracked open against the hardwood floor. Maybe some of his blood seeped down to the basement too. She realizes she should probably be scared or angry to be sharing a space with him but her feelings are liquid and potentially outside of her body.

“I’m a forgotten god,” she says to him. His name might be Andy. “They used to build temples for me, sacrifice their children at my altar. I used to drink blood and I gave nothing in return and they loved me still.”

“You didn’t do anything? You don’t have any godly powers?”

“Of course I do. I can see everything, Andy. I can hover above it all and see everything. Like Santa Claus. I watch boys jerk off in their rooms, thinking about killing women. I can decide if someone is good or bad.”

He looks down. “And if they’re bad?”

If she could take the blood of every bad man and flood the basement with it, she would.

“I don’t do anything,” Lana slurs. “I just watch.”

Her body slumps against the tiled wall then but she doesn’t feel it. Her eyes flutter closed and she doesn’t feel that either. Andy slaps her face a bit too and she doesn’t feel that but she does hear him in his stupid rat voice asking, “Are you okay?”

She asks him for a drink and when he comes back with vodka in a plastic cup, she downs it and when the fire hits her deteriorating stomach, everything comes back up and she spews her insides across the dirty bathtub.

“Oh, shit,” Andy says. “Uh.”

Lana laughs. She is coughing up blood. Someone pounds on the door. Demanding entry to a god’s domain?

Andy climbs into the bathtub behind her and wraps his arm around her torso. She tries to elbow him again but her limbs have been severed from her body or that’s what it feels like. Andy pushes his whole rat hand into her mouth and it tastes like skin, which is normal. His fingers slide down her throat and she retches harder now and Andy holds her tightly while she spews up blood and bile and grows dizzier. She laughs in between the coughing and gagging. Andy is not panicking but he’s gripping her body like it might slip up into the night sky if he lets go.

She vomits for some time then grows very tired. She tries to lay down but Andy won’t let her. He unlocks the bathroom door and says something to the girl outside and Lana doesn’t care what it is because she’s tired and she's going to sleep here. Even if Andy does something weird with her unconscious body, it’s whatever. It’s whatever. It’s all been done before, all will happen again. Lana watches everything. She’s holding her breath in her chest, she’s keeping it for herself.

A needle stabs into Lana’s thigh and her lungs sputter to life. It takes three minutes for her to catch her breath and for her brain to decide if it will keep chugging along. In the end, it does. Lana laughs.

---

Andy carries her up to the roof and she lets him stay with her for a while. She holds his clammy rat hand and he doesn’t try to finger her.

“How did you know?” She asks after a while, after the sky stops tilting.

Andy crosses his legs maybe because he has a boner. She decides it’s a respectful gesture either way. “It killed my mom, so…we could have saved her if we’d had narcan but nobody really knew about narcan then. You’re lucky someone downstairs had some.”

Lana laughs. “I don’t believe in luck, buddy.”

She laughs for a long time after that. She has to fill the silence or she’ll think about the fact that she just came very close to overdosing and if she thinks too hard about it she’ll have to consider whether or not she wishes she had died and it’s not cool to do that when you’re hosting.

“What do you believe in?” Andy asks when she finally stops laughing.

Lana sighs. Her lungs work because this rat man saved her. “I should probably figure that out, huh?”

Andy considers this. “You heard about Q-Anon?”

“Thank you for helping me, Andy, but I would like to be alone now.”

His hand slips from hers. “You don’t want to have sex?”

She keeps her eyes on the sky. Blue is turning to pale yellow like an almost healthy piss and the sun is rising again. In her head, Lana asks herself that very question. You don’t want to have sex? And for some reason, the answer that comes back is I want to live.

I want to live.

“No, Andy. There’s an orgy in my bedroom if you need something to keep your dick occupied.”

“Okay,” Andy says, standing. “Take care.”

I might, she thinks. I might just take all of the care that I can get.

you stay soft, get beaten / only natural to harden up

Previous chapter. Chapters 7 & 8 next week.

Table of Contents.

And that’s that. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.