Your Orisons May Be Recorded Read Free Page B

coffee.” I love coffee. I particularly like it the way the fashion kids make it, in a goblet shaped like a breast with a picture of a heart frothed on top. I love all that stuff.
    â€œSee, that’s what I’m talking about,” says Gremory. He takes another deep draw and closes his eyes. “Of all the things I’m going to miss when they’re gone, I think a beer and a spliff round the back of a decent bar is right up there.”
    Gremory once laid waste to an entire city-state in Sumer and made its rivers flow with gore. He’s calmed down a bit now, and I think he’s happier for it. I’m envious.
    The last of the sun is dipping its sucked-sherbet into the sugary sky over Oxford Street. We watch it disappear.
    â€œMastodon are playing in Brixton tonight,” says Gremory, after a while. “You want to come?”
    â€œNah, I’m good,” I say. “I think I’ll head on back upstairs.”
    â€œSee, you say that, my friend,” says Grem, tapping out his spliff and tucking the end in the pocket of his denim jacket, “but you know and I know that you’re going to wait till I’m gone, then get all hopped up on Dexedrine and find something long-haired and broken to fuck you into oblivion.”
    I don’t say anything. We all have our demons. Mine just knows me a bit too well.
    â€œHey,” he says, “no judge. Everyone’s got their poison. See you tomorrow. Stay cool.”
    He flips me the two-horned finger salute and jumps off the roof, turning into a pigeon as he falls. Then he flaps away toward Brixton.
    As soon as he’s gone, I go straight to Heaven.
    *   *   *
    Somewhere around the middle of the eighteenth century, I decided I should give up the tragic poets and doomed revolutionaries and, if I couldn’t abstain completely, at least settle down with someone relatively normal.
    And so I married a country pastor.
    He was surprised when I showed up in his study with my shining eyes, naked as the day I was never born.
    I thought we would at least have some shared interests. But he was one of those men of faith who looks away from the altar when he speaks his sermons, avoiding the eyes of an unwelcome houseguest.
    We were married in the springtime. He preferred me in my women’s weeds, white and perfect as the shepherdesses in the pastoral paintings he would not allow in the house. He was good to me, in his way. He was gentle, and never beat me.
    He would make love to me gingerly between his sheets, thrusting blindly in the dark, trying to touch as little of my body as possible. He said that that was God’s way. I tried to tell him that the God I knew was fire and passion and cared not at all about how humans choose to fuck.
    In the mornings I would boil him a single egg and watch him crack the shell with his short nails, not damaging the hard white jelly at all, leaving a pure and perfect oval so sinless that he sometimes couldn’t bear to bite into it.
    I thought it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t in love with him.
    It did.
    One night I came to him in my gown. So many layers in those days, especially in bed. I made my husband lie on top of the coverlet and lit the oil lamp.
    Then I took everything off. Every stitch. He watched me while I stepped out of my gown, my night stays, dirty-white lace dropping to the floor. The bloomers; the ribbons in my hair.
    Then I kept going. I took off my skin and hung it on a nail behind the door. I peeled away layers of flesh and bone until I stood there in my true form, burning and spinning, the rush in my ears so fierce I could hardly hear my husband scream.
    Then I left him.
    I hear he ended in a madhouse.
    There are worse places.
    *   *   *
    You can’t just walk into Heaven. There’s a dress code, and a door charge, too, unless you’re on the guest list. We’re not allowed to handle money, so I slip into something