Porco Dio by Rachel Rose

I hated his friends, his clothes, his hair and his attitude. Most of all I hated his “music.” He played guitar and was lead singer in a thrashcore band, Core Brutality. His music infiltrated my house, took over my garage, fucked up my ears. Summer afternoons were the worst. When he was little and we stuck him in soccer camp, I had been accustomed to kicking back in the freshly mowed yard, cracking open a beer, watching butterflies riot on the butterfly bush in companionable silence with my wife and our endearing, hideous potbelly pig, Francis Bacon. Now afternoons were spent wearing ear protection, trying to lip read whatever chores my wife wanted me to do while the house seethed with earsplitting caterwaul from the attached garage where Jaxon, my only son, tortured his guitar. Francis, who had sensitive ears, retreated to the mudroom at the back of the house, where he lay sighing among the work boots and scrub brushes. Even the pig’s curly tail drooped.
“Francis, darling, I couldn’t agree more,” I overheard Kate say. “Macaroon?” A brief snuffling followed, and Kate came into the living room, Francis trotting at her heels. They landed on the couch, one on either side of me. I put an arm around each of them. Wife. Pig. Dad. Son in the garage, contaminating our ears with his noise pollution.
I met Kate when I was past forty, newly sober, with a rescue dog named Zeppelin that kept biting people. Kate was an assistant to Zeppelin’s veterinarian. I thought she was cute. Then I ran into her again at a local AA group. It was there I really took a shine to her. She was so generous with new members, no matter how despairing or demanding or how many times they fell off the wagon. Then, too, Kate was so good with Zeppelin. Kate always knew how to bring out the best in everyone around her. I think that big black lab fell in love with her at exactly the same time I did.
We waited too late to have kids, and could only have the one. “Only one, but he’s a good one,” Kate liked to say. And then she stopped saying it. Jaxon wasn’t a good one. He was, as they say now, troubled. Not like I was troubled at his age, drinking too much, getting into fights, telling lies to get with girls, singing rock and roll. No, Jaxon was troubled in a way that sometimes made the hair stand up on my arms. I systematically hid all the knives in our house. Later, I made sure we had first aid kits on every floor with Naloxone in them.
I was the one who got Jax his guitar. He was only nine at the time. It was a white electric mini Stratocaster. I thought I could teach him, that we could rock out together. That worked for a little while. And then he chose the one kind of music, besides country, that made that impossible for me. At twelve, Jaxon got into thrashcore and got the bad attitude to go with it.
I used to play in a good old rock-n-roll band. My Pop was from the old country, Sicily originally. He would come to my shows. My parents loved music. They were both good dancers, and my Mom, could she ever sing. So I always felt I made them proud with my music, even though they didn’t like the other shit that went with being in a band.
We had one hit, but it was a big one. Sometimes I still hear it on the radio. “Freedom” – you know that song? The down payment for our house was from the royalties from that one song. Nothing else we did came to much, but we had fun.
As a kid, Jaxon’s energy was excessive, but so was his love. Every morning since he was a little guy he climbed out of his bed and came into ours, right in the middle, where he slept soundly and we slept badly. He snuggled our hands, one in each of his, and sang little ditties he made up:

Mommy snores and Daddy snores louder
Mommy makes soup named clam chowder
Go to sleep says Daddy or I’ll eat your feet

I keep the memory of those sweet, broken nights, and the tired mornings after, when I’d bring Kate coffee in bed, Jaxon breathing peacefully in the early light.
After age twelve, though, some fuse started to misfire. Every time Jax had a choice to make, he chose the one that would do the most damage to him and everyone in his orbit. By fifteen, there was no drug he hadn’t taken, no gadget he hadn’t stolen, no threat he hadn’t made.
We got him what help money could buy. Sports, medications and therapists. A pet pig because he was allergic to dogs and wanted something smart. Francis was smart, all right. From the time we brought him home, he was like Jaxon’s odd little brother, if my wife and I had made a sleek black piglet instead of a child. It was sometimes easy to forget the two of them were different species. I mean, only one of them left snout marks on our pants and gnawed on the table in anticipation of dessert. Only one of them liked to use his slender pink corkscrew of a penis the way a blind man uses a cane, tap-tapping it along the ground like a fifth leg. But they both had the same sensitivities. Both screamed too long and too loud at everything life threw at them. Their decibel range was damaging. When Jaxon squeezed Francis too hard, Francis shrieked and bucked like a wild thing. When Francis got ketchup snout marks all over Jaxon’s science project, Jaxon howled and ran in circles. They used to tug fight over toys, just like any brothers would. As long as we could hear the murmur of conversational English and grunts from the backyard, punctuated by the occasional scream and scuffle, we knew all was well. Sure, Francis grew bigger than we were told he would, and we soon had a two-hundred-pound bristly beast that we had to move to a pen in the backyard when we weren’t watching him (though Francis still slept in Jaxon’s bottom bunk). Sure, we had our problems. They vexed us, but they were good problems to have.
I was too much of a dickwad to know that within five years I’d look back on those days of musical pandemonium as halcyon. You don’t know what you’ve got/till it’s gone. Cinderella (among others). A good Philly rock band. Rock speaks truth like no other music. Thrashcore just yells at high speed like apes slinging shit at the zoo. Makes you want to cover your ears and duck.
Jax’s diagnoses were rolling in by this point. They kept changing. Anti-social personality disorder. Paranoid with schizoid tendencies. Bipolar. ADHD. But then four shrinks in three years said borderline. The worst diagnosis of all, one of them said bluntly, then turned his back to us to write something down.
But that was before Jaxon began to use seriously. First the Oxy for his back injury (skateboarding) followed by the heroin a year later (he started to replace the Oxy when the script ran out and he couldn’t get any more doctors to refill it). Memories of that time all boil down to one giant Fuck You to Kate and me, the flawed gods who made Jax. The time I asked him if he was shooting up and he said, “If I am, you’d be the last to know.” What kind of answer is that? Maybe I should have been harder on the kid.
When Kate brought him breakfast in bed on his birthday and couldn’t wake him up, she sat next to him, weeping. When he finally opened one eye enough to see her, he knocked over the tray and turned to the wall. I came in, all gorilla-dad, to pound some sense into him, not that I would have actually laid a hand on him. I ripped off the covers and was about to lay into him when he opened that eye just a crack. “Suck my cock, the both of you,” he muttered dreamily in his angel voice, then turned his skinny body to the wall and drifted away.
I don’t know how many girls, if any, sucked my son off. I hope at least one did. I hope he got to experience all that jazz. Hope it was good, and that he was gentle, but I never saw him care much about a single girl. When he was twelve and still golden, girls buzzed around him like bees on a sunflower. But then he took the detour that dead-ended.
Once I asked him, “Jax, you know how to protect yourself, right?” I put a box of condoms down on the coffee table next to him. He turned his head very slowly to look at the box, turned in slow motion to look back at me. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” he said, clutching the pillow. He started laughing, one leisurely giggle after another, eyes closed, head thrown back on the pillow. I could see the blue vein in his neck. “Condoms?” It was the most down-tempo response possible – a laugh, then a long pause, then another laugh. He was high, of course. But I don’t know if he was laughing at me, his dumb-ass father, or the idea a junkie like him needed a whole box of condoms, needed anything else than his junk, or laughing that I was such a naïve dad that I didn’t know he was getting laid every time he left the house. I had no way to measure the depths of my ignorance.
In the last year, there was one point we had to use the Naloxone twice in one day. To find your son blue and unconscious once in a lifetime was traumatic. But twice in the same day? You die a little too. You go cold inside. Porco Dio. As my Papà used to say.
This was just after he graduated from his treatment center. It was the first time he had made it through treatment. He’d been kicked out of three other programs, but this one he passed with flying colors. We allowed ourselves to hope. What were our options? To let him die on the street, or to let him live with those who made him, our flawed, hateful, beautiful child? We took him home. We would have taken him home forever, no matter the price.
The silver lining was that Francis Bacon could detect the difference between Jax nodding off and Jax on the slow slide to oblivion and certain death. Francis would come trotting in to get us at any hour. Usually the pig slept through the night, so when he came for us, we ran.
“He’s going to die, you know,” Kate said to me one night after the ambulance had left. “One of these days we’ll miss the window, or we’ll be out to dinner or something, and we’ll lose him.”
“Or what if he doesn’t?” I said. “What if we just have to do this until we both die? Which is worse?” I could tell Kate anything. She just put her arms around me. Francis flopped down at our feet, our own pet monster. But Francis was a good drug pig. Humans can get habituated to everything, and we got used to reviving our blue-faced boy, sometimes plucking the very needle out from his arm or neck or ankle. It was the new normal. We never left home together, and tried to be home as much as we could. We drove Jaxon to the part of town where he scored his drugs, waited in the car while he did what he had to do, made sure he had enough for the next week. Judge me if you want, it makes no difference. When we didn’t drive Jax, he got himself there, and we preferred that he not die alone in an alley. We preferred him shooting up in his own room, nodding off in his own bed with us and his pig and his Naloxone nearby.
Francis Bacon had a sixth sense about Jaxon. Like they weren’t just brothers, but twins. One time I remember in particular. We’d been up early in the garden. Kate had weeded the tulips and I was mulching the raspberries. Francis Bacon was standing among the mounds of new asparagus plants, drilling the moist earth with his impossibly slender pink prick, a dopey expression on his face. It was a peaceful moment. Without warning, Francis lifted his snout, sniffed the air, resheathed himself, and trotted off to find Jaxon. We followed. We could read our pig. Jaxon was in the top bunk where he’d slept since he was six, already over the threshold to the other side. I checked his airway while Kate, having veterinary training, administered Naloxone. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last. I guess I remember it because we were happy there in the garden, just doing the ordinary chores.
Time passed. We moved from the outer circle of hell to a new inner sanctum. Jaxon grew ever more malcontent with his lot. He left home (never for more than a month or two) and came back scabbed, stinking of yeasty piss, angrier than ever. He knocked Kate down, and I locked up the screaming pig and called the cops. We pressed charges, with the hope that he’d see the error of his ways, and be contained long enough to get clean. Less than forty-eight hours later Jax was back on the couch sharing a bucket of vanilla frozen yogurt with Francis, a bouquet of red roses still wrapped in their cellophane, dropped on the table as an apology to his mother.
He committed a string of burglaries, for which we hoped again he might be confined to a safer place. Then, his paranoia growing, he began to harm himself. I came in one morning to a kitchen that stank of cigarettes and booze and found him sitting at the table, a chef’s knife through his left hand. He watched the blood seep into Kate’s Provençal tablecloth with eyes at half-mast.
In the ER he said to us in front of the nurse: “It’s your fault. You’re the reason I’m even in here.” The nurse, a tough, inked specimen of a man who looked like he’d known hard times himself, said, “Zip it. Not another word.” Kate and I looked at each other, and she burst into tears. The nurse wrapped us both in a bear hug. “None of this is your fault,” he said. “I’ve seen everything you can imagine, and some things you can’t. So listen to me. And I’ll tell you something else. I never see these situations turn out well. You maybe think you’ve hit rock bottom, but you’re not even close. Protect yourselves.”
We went home, just me and Kate. Two days later Jaxon was discharged. We could have asked: How? How do you protect yourself? But we lacked foresight, or vocabulary. We lacked something essential. I still don’t know what.
When Jaxon was a preschooler, Kate had a relapse of her drinking that lasted a couple of years. They were bad years. But even though Kate was a drunk, she was never mean. She just checked out. We knew where we were in the hierarchy: below the booze. We kept waving at her to get her attention, begging her to come back. We were so happy when she did.
You can drive yourself crazy looking for the reason, the one true reason. You can invent a whole new religion and you will still be deluding yourself. It is impossible to recognize the ordinary day when everything will be divided into the time before and the after-time. Have you ever heard a pig scream in terror? I hope to God that you never do. I’d heard Francis scream before, but not like this. Kate was wailing, too. It was unbearable.
“Shut up!” I yelled at my screaming wife and our screaming pig. “Please,” I added. Kate and I were back at couple’s therapy and Dr. P’s advice about respectful dialogue was on my mind, though the “please” wouldn’t change much. I thought Jaxon and Francis had had another tug of war over the beanbag chair that Francis liked to mount. I wanted to get rid of that damn chair. I thought it was nothing, just an argument, just noise.
It was insane. Insane that I didn’t look up right away. I knew as soon as it got quiet, as soon as I actually looked at my wife. Kate stared at me with owl eyes. Francis nosed Kate, and I followed her gaze.
White socks. Legs. Hanging from the pull‑up bar. I could only take in pieces of what I saw. Big loose hands, dangling on his knobby wrists.
I lifted Jax by the legs to take the pressure off. But my boy weighed more than I could bear. “Please,” I said again, and Kate took it up. “Please. Oh, God. Please.”
“A knife, Kate. Scissors. Please.”
Kate got a knife but couldn’t cut the belt from the beam. I held his body, my arms shaking with effort. Kate hacked through the belt with her pruning shears. Then we put him down on the couch and tried to get the belt off his neck. I called 911. He was so dead, our boy. I knew I should get Kate out of there. But I was done. I could do no more. I sat on the floor with my wife, the pig, and our quiet son. “Please,” I kept repeating. “Please,” Kate would say back.
Who were we haggling with? God? I couldn’t stop myself. It was Kate who pulled me out. “Please,” she said, rising, her hands flapping like birds on her wrists, and I followed without looking over my shoulder at Jaxon. Kate went back for Francis. But Francis, our overwrought demon pig, shrieked when she pulled him. She put her hands around his collar and tugged but it was no contest. He stood guard over Jaxon’s body and would not be moved. Every time she tugged, he screamed. She couldn’t get him out and we couldn’t let the police in. Francis had a habit of charging strangers. We didn’t want the cops to shoot him. Finally Kate opened a bag of sour cream and onion chips and shook them in front of his snout. Francis left Jaxon’s body without a backward glance.
I wanted him to stay. I wanted that pig to keep screaming forever. But it was over. We penned Francis. Kate let the paramedics and the cops in. If we looked we could see Jaxon laid out on the couch, so we tried not to look. We didn’t know where to put our eyes. We hovered a few inches above the floor. Kate’s hands were never still.
Jaxon’s phone rang from the table where he’d left it. The ringtone was a clip of Pizzatramp’s “Ciggy Butt Brain” played so fast and hard that I wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t asked Jaxon what they were saying. Now I heard every word:

Damn you cunt, give me your lighter
You won’t give it back, ciggy butt brain

Whoever it was hung up, called back, and we heard it again. And again. Kate and I stared at each other. The policeman said, “You can answer it. Or I can turn it off.”
“Don’t you want it for evidence?”
“Evidence of what? Pretty clear what happened here.”
“Can you just shoot the phone?”
The cop smiled a sad smile and turned off Jaxon’s phone. He stayed with us for the two hours it took for the hearse to arrive. Then it was just me and Kate and Francis for the foreseeable future.
A potbellied pig lives about fifteen years. Francis was already ten. I sat on the couch where Jax had been laid out and did the math. So we’d have another five years with our monster, and then we’d bury him and it would just be me and Kate and then one of us would die. What the fuck was the point? Mowing the lawn so it could grow back. Eating dinner so I could take a big shit in the morning. Waking up feeling like I had shrapnel embedded in my heart and lungs. I envied Jaxon his courage, if that’s what it was.
Now that he was dead and buried, I liked to go in the garage and pick up his guitar. I don’t know if like is too strong a word. Anyway, that’s what I did. Everything was just like he’d left it, which is to say, a fucking mess. I picked up that guitar and played a few chords. His lyrics were still in a heap on the floor.
I listened to the music on his phone obsessively. I was trying to give him a chance. I know it was too late for us, but not too late for the gong show in my head. I started hitting the thrashcore shows. I saw All Pigs Must Die. I saw Agoraphobic Nosebleeds. I played DRI – Dirty Rotten Imbeciles – as I drove to Whole Foods, just a typical washed‑up old rock and roll daddy. I was pushing sixty-five and carried a belly that looked third trimester. Nobody would recognize me.
I wrote my first thrashcore song in Jaxon’s memory.

I changed your shitty diapers!
You pissed in my eye!
Why the fuck were you
the first one to die?

“Honey?” yelled the silver-haired old woman who was somehow my wife Kate. I pretended not to hear. Kate stepped into the garage and turned off the drum machine. Sweat was pouring off me. I’d never played that hard. It was pure energy. I was the speed of light squared. I whaled on that guitar, holding it down for a long note.
“Honey!” Kate practically screamed. “Put down the guitar and come eat!”
My lip curled. I wanted to slam the guitar on the floor. I wanted to throw it through the window. I wanted to bash my head with the cymbals until I went deaf. Kate grabbed my hand and I looked into her bruised eyes. “You can’t bring him back. You can’t become him,” she said.
“Katie,” I said.
“It’s too late,” said Kate, taking my hand and leading me to the table like the drooling idiot I was bent on becoming.
After dinner, we sat in the yard in silence, holding hands. I could hear a frog creaking away somewhere. Francis Bacon rooted in the lawn for grubs. I knew I should probably get him out of there, but I didn’t move. My plan was to become the oldest thrashcore superstar in the world. My band was going to be called Jaxon. I would shower my wife with jewels and celebrity perks she didn’t want. I would play until I was deaf, play until I was using a walker, until I died onstage. I would play until I rose up to heaven to meet him. That was my genius plan.
It was at a Dust Bolt show that I met Delilah. She was jumping around, slamming into fans while I stood like I’d been turned to stone, trying to see the band through Jaxon’s eyes. I stared at the crowd, and Delilah stared right back at me. She had a glossy pout and sad shadowed eyes like a Bouguereau peasant.
Within two songs I knew she was a woman of the night. Certain men would gesture, cock a finger, and Delilah would disappear for a surprisingly short period of time: two songs, maybe three. She always came back alone. She stood to the side for a bit, adjusted her miniskirt over her slim hips, checked her lipstick, while all around her people smashed into each other. Then she’d step into the fray with this little grin on her face. Watching her was better than what was offered on stage.
So it felt like fate smiled on me when Delilah slammed into a couple, slipped (the floor was gruesome) and used my leg as a pole to get back on her feet. I extended a hand, which she took.
“Hey, old man,” she shouted, leaning in. She smelled of semen and artificial cinnamon. “What’s a grandpa like you doing in a place like this?”
“Killing time,” I shouted back. “What’s a high-school girl like you doing here on a school night?”
She leaned close to me. “I’m in college,” she said. But she was lying.
“Would you be willing to fuck me?” I asked.
“Why would that proposition appeal to me?” she asked. I was offended that she was offended. I’d seen her working all evening. But I played it cool.
“Fair question. You being young, beautiful and happy, me being old, pathetic and depressed.”
She laughed. “And ugly. Don’t forget ugly.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever you charge I’ll pay double. I’m a rich old fart. Heard of Flint to Flame?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. We were big, back in the day. Name your price. But I’m taking you somewhere comfortable.”
She named a ridiculously high price. I just smiled. We shook on it. I wasn’t like those men who wanted a blowjob midway through a concert. I considered myself a man with class. I’d never hooked up with a hooker before. I took Delilah to a motel, checked us in, undressed her, kissing her narrow shoulders, her slender throat. I pulled her miniskirt off and came face to face with her dick. She laughed at the stunned expression on my face.
“Surprise!” she said. I was entirely without words.
“I could tell you had no idea. Most guys figure it out before we get to this base. Don’t be mad. I’ll give you the best blowjob of your life. Didn’t peg you for a Dust Bolter, you didn’t peg me for a girl with a dick. Life’s a wonder isn’t it?” Delilah was babbling. I was oddly aroused but the sadness hadn’t left. Where’s my fucking oblivion? I thought. Delilah had two spots of color in her cheeks. So she’s a dude, so what? I’m cool with whatever, right? I was talking to myself in my head while Delilah went down on me. This is all cool right? After what I’ve been through there are no surprises left, none that matter. My son, hanging by a belt, now that was a surprise. Even though we knew exactly where that train was headed, it was still totally unexpected when it pulled out of the station and the last whistle blew.
I thought of Kate, at home on the porch, sitting there in the dark, of Francis asleep in the shoes, half of which were still Jaxon’s. I grabbed for Delilah’s extraordinary breasts and a sob tore my throat. Tears sprang into each eye and slid down my face. I wiped them off on Delilah’s titties, left, right. Two puny old man tears. Not that she’d notice. I grew soft in her mouth. That she noticed. She crawled up my chest.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked, tucking her head under my chin.
“I do. It’s just been a rough year.” I smiled at her.
“I’m gonna keep you company anyway, okay?”
“Okay.”
In the middle of the night, I went down on her. It was weird, but she seemed to like it. Then I moved her dick to the side and put my hand over it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the complexity. I fell asleep with my head on her thigh. In the morning, there she was, grinning down at me as I woke up.
“Now’s the part where you have to steal my wallet or save my life,” I told her. She rolled her eyes.
“Listen,” I told Delilah. “My son Jaxon killed himself last May. He was heavy into thrashcore. That’s why I go. I know I’m a sad sack. But I’m a sad sack on a mission.”
She yawned. “Why don’t I let you buy me breakfast?” she said. It was such a relief that she didn’t say how sorry she was about Jaxon, that she literally didn’t care, that I laughed.
“Be happy to. I don’t think there’s room service at this place. We’ll have to get dressed.”
“Want me to try again first?” she asked. “My reputation’s on the line.”
Did I? Didn’t I? Delilah moved down my chest and this time my body did what it was supposed to do. Thrashcore’s beat dragged me under, one of Jaxon’s songs that I’d heard maybe ten thousand times.

Suck it idiot rot in your own hell
Fuck you subhuman trash
now you pay the bill
We’re coming for you.
We’re coming for you.
Soldiers of hell, crack your skull
We’re coming for you, we’re coming for you.

There it was, my moment of oblivion. Blackout. Ah. And then that moment passed. I was in bed with this person who was so alive, so fully herself.
“How did you know you were . . . ?” I asked. She cocked her head, waiting for me to say it. But I didn’t know which word to say. Just then my phone lit up on the hotel nightstand. “Hey, a pig!” said Delilah, grabbing for the phone, where Francis Bacon grinned toothsomely from the screen saver. “I love pigs! I love animals. When I was a kid I wanted to be a veterinarian.”
All kids want to be veterinarians for a while. I took my cell out of Delilah’s hand. It was Kate. Who else would it be? Kate, who braided her silver hair in front of the mirror, singing Fleetwood Mac in that lilting voice. When Jaxon was a toddler and Zeppelin was still alive, Kate would walk with Jaxon in the backpack, walk for hours at Zeppelin’s senior pace, never impatient. When Zeppelin couldn’t walk, Kate fixed up a red wagon that was big enough for both boy and dog, and pulled them all around the neighborhood.
I thought Kate might go back to drinking after we lost Jax. But she read my mind. “I will never do that to you again. Not now, not in the future, not in the next life.” Instead of drinking herself unconscious, Kate would go to bed early in the afternoons and just lie there staring at nothing, the quilt pulled up to her chin, until the day ended and I came to bed. The only difference was that she smelled sober.
I was not cheating on Kate. I was cheating on the unrelenting sorrow that defined my every moment. I knew I would tell Kate everything, and that she’d forgive me. Despite it all, I was loved, so maybe I was a lucky man. I don’t know.
“Kate your wife?” asked Delilah, pushing her wispy blonde hair behind her ears.
“Yeah. And our pig is named Francis Bacon.”
“Oh! Clever. Does Francis Bacon come in the house? Did you get him as a piglet? Do you have any more pictures?”
I answered all Delilah’s questions, then lobbed a few her way: Did you always feel like a girl? (yes, usually) Were you saving up for the rest of the surgery? (no) and did your parents accept and support you? (here she patted my hairy paunch affectionately and asked, “Would I be sucking your old cock if my parents accepted me?”)
“We would have accepted you,” I told Delilah, and meant it. I meant it so hard tears came into my eyes. But Delilah laughed. “You are such a mess,” she told me, reaching for the remote. “Don’t go all Mother Teresa on me.”
We created God out of our dust and tears. I’m in bed with a teenager who is both the son I lost and the wife I’m losing. I want to load Francis in my truck and swim with him and Delilah and Kate at the lake where the water is always dark and quiet.
I must have been looking at Delilah with my sad face on, because she snapped my belly. Ping!
“Ask me any word,” she said. “I can give you the definition of anything. It’s my superpower.” She pinged me again. “What’s the matter – scared? Come on, give me a word.”
I never went to college, though more than a few of them wanted me. But in the moment I couldn’t think of a single good word – a challenging word, but not so hard that Delilah would be humiliated if she didn’t know it.
“Conundrum,” I said.
“Seriously?” Delilah asked me, sucking in her lips in disappointment. “If that’s what you think of my capabilities we have a predicament ahead.”
“Nice. Impetuous hedonist.”
“I actually think of myself as a cautious ascetic.”
“Unlikely in your line of work.”
“You’re biased. I never mix business with pleasure, and my pleasure is only in art. But all conformists make the same mistake.”
I was stung. “I’m the original rebel,” I said. “I was out making trouble when you were shitting yellow.”
“Rebels are the most conservative people in the world. They never stray from the script. Every rebel is exactly the same. Like father like son, right?”
The rage rose from my gut and volcanoed through my head. I could feel my face go red. I shoved Delilah so that she fell back on the bed. “Shut your face,” I said.
“What you gonna do, shut it for me?” she said, leaning back on her elbows. One corner of her mouth was twisted in something like a smile. “Perfidious swinophile. Shut your own fucking face.”
I walked to the grimy window, gripped the sill. I took a deep breath, then three more. “Please forget I said that,” I said. “That’s not who I am.”
“Look, don’t feel sorry for me. I like what I do better than the alternatives. I have money in the bank and I turn eyes on the street. So worry about yourself.”
“Roger that,” I said.
“C’mere, you woebegone imbecile.” She opened her arms.
I showered with Delilah, and she dried my back with the musty motel towel. Then she gave me one last blowjob for the road. We never went for that breakfast. I dropped Delilah off in front of the requested building, though it didn’t look like a place anyone lived. She gave me a matchbook with her cell number and I gave her a fistful of bills. She blew me a kiss. “I hope I see you again,” she said. “I hope I meet Francis.”
“Maybe that will happen. Maybe it won’t. But don’t hope. Hope is the worst possible thing to do with your time,” I told Delilah.
“I hope you get help,” she said, and patted my shoulder.
If God were a pig life would be simpler. God is a sadist. The evidence for that is so undeniable that only a masochist or a believer would deny it. I picked up a bunch of yellow tulips for Kate and, perfidious swinophile that I am, some potato chips for Francis. I drove up the driveway, where swallows swooped over the lawn. The doors were open to the gathering silent night. On the bed upstairs lay my wife, eyes open, the quilt drawn to her shoulders. I lumbered up the stairs, desperate to reach her. “Kate,” I called. She didn’t answer. No dose of Naloxone would bring her back from wherever she had floated away to. I opened the door. She didn’t turn toward me.
“Katie,” I said, sitting down on the bed next to her and picking up her cool hand. “Katie, let’s run away together. Let’s just go. We can live in New York City. We can live in Paris. Anywhere. Let’s get out of here.”
She turned and looked at me. I pressed my case for a geographic cure, for all the reasons we’d been wrong to stay here after losing Jax. She wasn’t smiling, but she was listening. I lifted her unresisting hand to my mouth and kissed it.
A snout nudged open the door. Francis, grunting with joy, galumphed across the room and launched himself to the bed, landing on us. Snorting, he shoved his snout under my wife’s armpit, where he liked to burrow, and where she consequently sported a permanent purple bruise.
Kate patted Francis on his bristly head. I still held her hand. She squeezed mine. Then I lay down next to her. Between us, grunting with pleasure, was the only being we’d managed to keep alive. The bedroom curtains dropped and lifted, open to the gathering silent night.

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Rachel Rose is the author of the memoir The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops (St. Martin’s Press). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Monte Cristo Magazine, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and The Best American Poetry.