I sort of smile to keep from crying. This is as I was in love, a little gone, no different. I feel it all, the self-help books and my aura, this little genie floating past me from the bottle like a man’s buttoned down chest against my troubled forehead. All the love I ever felt, from the bottle of brandy, past me. Back at the window, I transmit. No passers-by tonight. The sailor eludes the sonar in my ritual scan. It’s 200 mph backwards to my bed in a drunken stupor. End of transmission.

This is pause on the video. I twitch rapidly between a few frames, an unrecognizable movement. This man on the screen beams at me like Paris traffic lights and I just go numb. It’s life to the lips and I know I’ll soon stop hurting in this yellow flare, thrown across the furniture like an overweight marionette. Mr Doctor told me I’ve a bulletproof liver so I’ve tried sleeping on the left side, else it’ll crush the heart. A trail of fire down my throat and towards my soul, clearing it up, bringing out the best.

When Rhonda drops by she’s going for the clean-up straight away, acting like my nanny, doing all the cooking, not letting me help. A few good meals every now and then in this squalor, working the hoover afterwards like socially aware big sisters do. She’s full of the same old same old, how can you live like this, the Falklands tiff was over 20 years ago, she says, I’m not coming back after today, leave those damn penguins behind you already and I turn hot, almost frying under my blue old maid’s perma-blazer.

The video sailor is almost done with his homecoming from the war.

Somebody talks to me after weeks of silence but I don’t care to listen, I take it one sense, one frame at a time, click, click, clicking some rhetoric away. Rhonda thinks I don’t feel them. Yet every word leaves a mark, chipping off a piece of me like rabid claws at broken marble. So back at the window, I drink up and transmit. She won’t receive me today, she never will. It’s 20:20:04 on my VHS and the good part is getting closer.

In my double-triple-buzz it’ll be almost real. I’m so tired, so pissed, slowly working on dinner. Hatred must be Rhonda’s secret ingredient to delicious cooking. I’m happy today. She can’t take it so for her it’s fast-forward out of my sight and up the street.

It’s 20:22:23, 1983 and a man hands over a scale model of HMS Yarmouth, smiling. Then there’s this gorgeous blonde, a little tipsy and full of life. It’s my last proper Christmas, George Michael’s straight, the sailor and I in the dark corridor, hand in hand, minding the broken glass. We kissed as drunken students threw plates in the campus kitchen, one down for each lash of the tongue we exchanged. Nothing was said but the sailor wanted us on film and I love him for it.

It’s the blur of the afternoon and I’ve watched my tapes and Dempsey and Makepeace over and over and can’t click anymore. I hear it but can’t really see so I just let myself switch off. The rest of the season is presented in my head. Sometimes I dream it up, other times it’s all movement and laughter in my living room. But I won’t be sitting on the sofa, that’s the gift.

So he doesn’t vanish on September 27th, 1983. I never went for a four day dizzy spell, lured by some proud autumn gales, adrift in my knickers, getting battered and raped and pissed on. We got married. No kids yet but sometimes he treats and loves me like one. Mountains of scale models from the Royal Navy. Permanent beta-waves in the brain due to skin, touch, and sex.

Moments later a horrible tugging in my neck, angry syllables tearing up my head. Open the door. O-pen the bloo-dy door, Vic-ki. It’s late and Rhonda’s back. My skull is filled with centipedes, the heart a rotting, kicking fetus, buried in my chest. I know you’re in there Vicki.

Sometimes I feel I should’ve kept the taps off. But not today, again not tonight. The day Maggie resigned: a bottle of scotch. Reagan’s funeral: two bottles of Jameson. I navigate with the cabinet, I explain, as Rhonda’s all business minus the rhetoric, not seeing any change, working the door behind her with much intended force.

Sit, she says, in the darkness of my home. Sit down and shut it.

She keeps hissing and I keep fumbling with my glassware. Tell me something, Vicki. It’s too late to shop for more. Tell me when you last felt some dignity. A snake coils on my sofa with fancy footwear and some designer fangs, dripping with saintly poison. Some books fall as I look for the light switch. I cut my hand reaching too far behind the shelf so I wail like a banshee.

Sit down, now, Rhonda screams.

I do as I’m told, heaving and back on the sofa. She puts her hard lips to work, telling someone on her mobile to just pick her up and we’ll get this over with. I find the remote.

Vicki, she begins. You were quite right. You stuck to the penguins and bottles and kept yourself busy, even comfortable at times, didn’t you. It was the right thing to do for someone like you. But you should’ve stopped there. Do you know how much I went through because of you?

Rhetoric, click. Do you know what dignity feels like? Click, click. All the time you click I was click click excuse click hoping click not out of mind click click rather abrupt.

Then someone strolls past the window like a sailor, towards the transmitter’s lair. An offbeat aftershave rubs against my senses. It’s the man from my VHS. He’s older but just as well-built, if a little run-down. The centipedes run spirals around my brain. A ring, a tie with a big pin, class of sorts, masculine success. I stay still as my heart speeds up, soon slowing down close to nothing.

The sailor sits down opposite of me but I’m not really there, too thirsty to care.

Look at me Vicki, he says, his past a forgery. Rhonda glows briefly like a woman seducing. Then she gives me and him the hard eye and he shuts up. I don’t really care to listen. I look at the seaman and he’s part man, part TV so I just laugh. He must’ve expected sentimental tears and me crawling on the floor, hugging his legs after twenty-three years of videos.

The snake rears itself, rattling in disappointment.

Vicki, he says like a common cowardly man. Please try to click, click, click. Rhonda stands up. Look at her, look at my sister. Rhonda’s getting bigger in stature, a puppeteer for my marionette. The sailor rubs his poorly shaven chin. I feel some pressure and I want to be back at my window, face numb against the glass.

I feel a sudden touch, a Prada-snake coiling tight around my neck, the cold scaly flesh choking me in relentless, passionate bursts with nature’s pure and justified predator instinct.

Wait. I bought roses for myself when I became the best of my class at community college. I want Rhonda to know, she needs to hear this! I can’t talk but after a few moments of quiet she nods. The sailor presses play and lifts me up. I can’t leave but still do. I inhale a scene of windows and still women as my home town is enveloped in the mists of my most flawlessly executed transmission. I then disappear, rewinding back into the unknown.

—

Robert Ciesla is a Finnish filmmaker and author. His stories have been in Rio Grande Review, Double Dare Press, Linguaphobous, and Cezanne’s Carrot.