Dealey Plaza

A Love Story

Nora is the shape of my hands, and she snakes through Dallas on the road to all logical conclusions, where all the first sons have vile and violent muses, to the place where everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

Nora is a chorus of furies that sing in bites and scratches. Nora hates eating when everyone else does, she stuffs her face in secret when no one is watching. Nora knows all the words to songs no one else has heard. Nora dies at the end of the story, but doesn’t, and curses me to repeat her over and over again, forever.

The way I remember her now her body was the shape of my hands, because I don’t have any photographs of her, we met before MySpace was invented, she died before Facebook was invented. The dot matrix printed picture of her on the booklet they handed out at her funeral was from when she was at school, I haven’t looked at it in years, I screwed it up in my fist at some point that day, I still have it, in a white shoe box that contains everything I have of hers, Spirax notebooks full of her hallucinatory prose about the First World War, a vintage postcard photograph of the Texas Book Depository that reads WORLD FAMOUS DEALEY PLAZA on the back, that she’d drawn a smiley face and a love heart next to, a black leather purse with a gold zip containing two syringes and two needles, one still in the packaging, a small commemorative spoon with “Western Plains Zoo, Dubbo NSW” above and below a tiny faded drawing of a tiger on the end, a chipped plastic lighter, a thin black rubber tube coiled like an eel, and what was once a small zip loc bag containing about, .3 of a gram of heroin, that had once been light brown, that the air had got too, or maybe moisture, it went the consistency of chewing gum for a while, then hard, and black, decomposing.

It ate through the plastic eventually, and over the years, when I opened the box up and I took it out, I’d roll it between my thumb and forefinger like a worry bead. I’d unspool the black rubber tube and run my fingers down it like a rosary, annunciating a mystery, stopping when I found the marks her teeth made in the rubber at the end from all the times she’d bit it and pulled it around her arm, the agony in the garden. When I opened it today the rubber tube was frayed and brittle and if you bit it now, it would crumble. The black ball of plastic and smack was gone, just a dark stain on the mauve fabric inside the purse. Nora’s gone too, completely, which is why I started writing about her. Something I promised myself I’d do years ago, promised her I’d do. But couldn’t. Something decomposed.

Everyone else I ever loved, at that point, had been cremated. Enough people I’d loved had died that I thought I’d made a friend of death but I never made right with decay. It started a few weeks after the funeral. Nora is rotting. Would appear in my brain, an intrusive thought. I’d see her, for a moment. Nora is rotting in a box. As we went about our business and I hid my grief. It’s the day my girlfriend, Nora’s best friend, found out that I'd been sleeping with her for months before she died, she’s staring at me with a profound mix of contempt and sympathy, a combination of emotions I didn’t think were possible, and I want to say something, think of something to say, and before I can Nora doesn’t have eyes anymore, Nora doesn’t have a tongue anymore, the insects have eaten them and I have to walk away. She came back for her things when I wasn’t there. She took every single photograph of Nora with her. Out of spite, or maybe mercy.

So now Nora is the shape of my hands, which is something Nora told me, Paul Éluard said it about his wife, Gala, who left him for Salvador Dali. Things like that would spill out of her, quotes and poems and references, revealing a thought process, that I shared, the eroticism of infidelity always in the background. It’s the weekend my girlfriend and I went down to Tasmania so she could meet my parents, on the second day she got a call from Nora, who said she’s trying to get clean and could she come down and stay with us. We picked her up from the airport and drove down to our hotel past the MV L’Astrolabe, an old Antarctic Division ship, big and red and beige docked down opposite Salamanca Square, she pressed her nose to the glass window and stared, like a child would, with her eyes narrowed into contemplative slits. Héloïse and Abelard named their bastard son Astrolabe. Which is such a beautiful sentence, when you say it with a faint, French accent. She’s surreptitiously slipping her freezing cold hand into the pocket of my jacket to grip mine, and pass me the bag of heroin she’d sequestered in her vagina for the trip down, knowing my girlfriend would search her luggage for it later. “Who are Heloise and Abelard?” my girlfriend asked. They had an affair. Nora replied. It’s a wonder they never figured it out sooner.

I try to think about that day and being squeezed in the backseat of a small coupe with Nora on the way back from the airport but it reminds me of a recurring dream I’d have, after she died, her and I squeezed into the coffin together, I can see her, there’s a pale blue light with no apparent source, entropy hasn’t taken her yet, and I’m claustrophobic and scared but Nora curls up under my armpit and tells me not to be, she’s wearing the blue school formal dress her parents put her in for the viewing, I strain my legs against the silk lining and the wood to get out but it doesn’t budge, and I start hyperventilating, it gets warmer and warmer and there’s no air, then flames start licking under the seams of the casket, and I realize they’re cremating us, and I relax, and she laughs, and we both laugh as the flames take us before I wake up sweating.

I met Nora at a party my girlfriend threw at my apartment, she had her own house, but it wasn’t suitable for some reason, and when she said party, I kind of thought like maybe a dozen people but there were… almost a hundred crammed into a loft apartment in a building that had used to be offices and I think the Church of Scientology owned it, they were next door. If you went up on the roof you could lean over the ledge and peer into the top floor of the Scientology building and see the room where they ran around a giant light globe, like moths. I showed Nora that once. And she leaned back and grabbed the front of my shirt and said that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. When I think of that night, on the roof, Nora’s skin would have turned the colour and consistency of a dead moth, so fragile if you touched it, would have turned to dust.

In the apartment, the word ramshackle comes to mind but it wasn’t really that, nowadays we’d say there was something liminal about it. The roof was that tryptophobic plaster offices like to use and the lights were fluorescent bars but everything else had been renovated to look, more or less, like nice apartments looked in the early 2000s. There were times in the last 20 years Nora’s flesh was full of holes like that roof. My landlord was an agreeable Chinese man who would disappear for months on end and only seemed to acknowledge the arrears for those weeks he was actually in the country, as though he were phasing into some different dimension all the months he wasn’t contactable. The only thing my place had going for it was a big covered balcony and the fact there was no one around, and it was close to Central, and I guess that’s why my girlfriend begged, or maybe demanded, to throw the party at my place.

To this day I have no idea what that party was in aid of, and I called my ex girlfriend, half way through writing this to ask, around the time I decided I’d actually hit “publish” on it, which she isn’t happy about, which is why unlike women in my other pieces, she doesn’t have a nom de guerre. She can’t remember either. But everyone was there. One particularly prominent journalist from back then, he barely registers as a blogger and part time podcaster nowadays, he stood wobbly on two of my bar stools and dropped his trousers and took his, I got to admit, prodigious member out and helicoptered it in front of his colleagues. Someone told me later that Julian Assange was there. There were, half a dozen guys in their early 20s who would go on to be government cabinet ministers there. One of them, the guys who would become ministers that is, was a six foot tall albino currently in prison for raping two teenage boys. It’s a strange detail to bring up but you don’t tend to forget six foot tall rapist albinos. His name was Gareth.

It constantly felt like there were a hundred people but there were probably many more, because people kept coming in, raising their eyebrows at the sudden scale of the whole affair and its chaotic nature, sipping a beer and then leaving. There was a dance floor in front of my TV, the whole thing was a big open plan loft kind of deal and someone had pulled down the dividers to where I slept, tipped my bed up against the wall so there was more space. It occurred to me there were so many people on the balcony the thing might heave and collapse. And I didn’t care. Bury them all. Nora is buried too.

“You’re being weird. You’re being awkward.” My girlfriend said to me, when she came into what had once been my kitchen but was now part recycling bin part queue for the toilet, and where I had decided to perch myself in a commanding position to survey the degradation of my living space and possessions. Nora is degraded to a skeleton in a chiffon party dress.

No I’m not. “Yes you are. You’re not talking to anyone. You should have invited your friends.” I know people here, I’m talking to Gareth. I gestured to the cyclopean albino next to me who wasn’t actually talking to me but was flirting aggressively with two hobbit like twinks.

You haven’t introduced me to anyone. I said in my defence. “You know all these people!” She said. Which was true. But I didn’t know them. This was many years ago. And I was a different person, who lacked confidence, the confidence to walk up to someone you know from television or radio or the newspaper or whatever and pretend that you care about them, the kind of guy who cold calls potential clients, who can pick up women in hotel bars, that man back then wasn’t me. And I can’t say exactly how long ago this was to protect the identities of some of the people but suffice to say the most advanced piece of technology in that apartment that night was a Blackberry.

You’ve been hanging out with your friends all night. “Fine come meet them.” We went out on the balcony and my first thought was, fuck I hope it collapses. Today, in a different time, a weird epoch, where whole epistemologies have been made and unmade and come undone I can articulate why these people aggravated me so but back then I couldn’t. The word woke hadn’t entered the lexicon. It was all skinny jeans and plaid and trucker caps and pouch tobacco and unironic or maybe ironic craft beers, which weren’t yet ubiquitous at bottle shops.

“Hey.” “Hey.” “Hey.” “Hey.” My girlfriend’s friends said as I entered the circle they were sitting in sharing a joint sucked down to a filtered nub. What’s happening. “Nora’s a fucking mess.” One said, my girlfriend nodded. “Nora’s a mess.” Who’s Nora? I attempted to ingratiate myself into the conversation via ignorance. “You know who Nora is, she’s our best friend.” Was your best friend, there’s plastic prosthetics slid up under her perfect cheekbones by the morticians to hold the shape of her face, they’re protruding through the decaying skin now.

I don’t think she’d ever mentioned Nora before, and we’d been together for six months at that point. Over the next few minutes it would become clear Nora, was not their best friend. Nora was what the Greeks would call a pharmakos, some kind of physical manifestation of all their grievances upon whom they heaped ritual contempt and would periodically cast out of their village. Over the subsequent years I’ve come to appreciate that all female friendship groups have a pharmakos, have a Nora. That’s a vital part of female social dynamics. They need a mess against which to judge themselves and to make themselves feel better about their own lives. I’ve also come to appreciate that the only women worth knowing are the Noras. The Pharmakos. They may very well be the only ensouled members of their gender. Nora’s soul is gone, or at least I hope it is, up and out of the box and through the dirt and the worms to the sky, or somewhere else.

“Nora said she’s coming but Nora never fucking comes.” Nora’s a mess. They concluded. I lit a cigarette, a real one, which was what really ingratiated me to the girls since they were sitting there clumsily rolling their own. This was when you could still get soft packs of Peter Stuyvesants. I donated them the last 5 to nods of appreciation. “Your boyfriend is cool.” That was a lie. I’m going to go get a pack of cigarettes.

I walked outside and sucked in very cool air untainted by second hand smoke and weed and the body odour of working journalists. It occurred to me to keep walking and not come back. You’re John. A voice, below and beside me said. There was a girl, so small if she hadn’t have said anything I wouldn’t have known she was there, crouched against the wall next to the door to the building. She stood up, she was wearing daisy duke cut off denim shorts and a Placebo t shirt and she had a Country Road bag twice the size of her own torso slung over her shoulder. I’m Nora. Your girlfriend’s best friend. Nora was the kind of person to just enter your personal space like she’d always belonged there, from before you were born, like she’d always been there. She was too small to reach up and kiss me on the cheek so she kissed me on the neck in an act of casual intimacy I don’t think I’d ever felt from a woman in the decade or so I’d known that’s what I wanted from women. Where are we going? She said. And I laughed, confused, you’re obviously running away, I was coming up but they aren’t answering their phones. And if her boyfriend is running I don’t want to go up there. Nora grabbed my hand and swung it like we were about to embark on a great adventure together. She held my hand like that in my dreams every night for years. The meat on her hands would have gone first and her fingernails would have kept growing long after the dirt settled.

It was the first time I’d seriously laughed all night. No I’m just going to get cigarettes. She unzipped the giant Country Road bag, which I would come to find out later, was a kind of magic pudding and would contain whatever you needed to survive at exactly the right time you needed it, all the time. Inside were two cartons of cigarettes. I have cigarettes. But don’t tell those bitches. Let them roll their own. When I think about it now, Nora’s skin, thin like cigarette paper, the colour of a used filter.

She took a pack out and said we should have one before going back up. How bad is it up there? She asked, I took a long drag and admitted, pretty fucking bad. She nodded sagely. Nora always nodded sagely. She was actually younger than me, by five years, but she always seemed so old. She did this to me once, in year 10, at my parents house when they were away. Invited like, 300 people to a party. It’s a cunt of a thing to do. It was the strangest sensation, and one I’d feel so many times afterwards with Nora, of someone who was thinking the same things I was thinking, before I could say I was thinking them. We smoked in silence.

Silence of the grave. We finished that cigarette and we didn’t say a word. When she was done she patted me on the chest and said let’s do this and we went back upstairs. It was the first time I’d felt that comfort with someone, that you didn’t have to talk to.

We opened the door to the apartment to a blast of hot air and a wall of human bodies and Nora exclaimed long and slow fuck this as we started to squeeze our way through into the living area Nora just casually knocking people over with that massive bag that never left her shoulder out of which I’d later discover she basically lived. I pointed at the balcony and said, your friends are out there thinking to myself, that was the end and I was merely an interlocutor between Nora and people she actually wanted to see, like I had been for everyone else my girlfriend knew but she instead sat down cross legged in front of my television, and started fingering through my DVDs I want to see what kind of shit you’re into she yelled over the din of the party. Cool. Cool. Cool. She said, pulling cases out and throwing them on the low table one by one, until she came to a copy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the very first 2002 edition on DVD and she held it up between her thumb and forefinger with wide eyes and said Very Cool. We should watch this together. She said with an absolute and disarming sincerity like I should have kicked every one of those mother fuckers out of the house right then and there and Nora and I should have sat on the couch under a blanket and watched it together. And not for the first time my psyche caught this barb in passing that I have a girlfriend, a nagging voice that would be louder and quieter and sometimes non existent in the weeks and months after. The same genre of intrusive thought as Nora’s organs are all gone, probably taken out before she was even buried.

I guess we should see these bitches. She hooked her arm under mine, like we both needed to steel ourselves for the experience, but also because I’d realize later, on some level women are intensely competitive, and whilst Nora was socially, a kind of heel that the other girls looked down on she was the psychological alpha, by virtue of her confidence, the fact she had no self doubt, she was possessed of absolute self confidence that her friends lacked. Nora judged herself against no one, except some complex calculus only Nora truly knew.

“Oh here she is” they said, when we finally made it out. Heyheyheyhey. Nora said, in a staccato that would become incredibly familiar in the weeks and months to come. She put her bag down and leaned down and kissed all the girls on the cheek Mwamwamwamwa. And then my girlfriend gestured to her with four fingers beckoning and there was a reason they had summoned Nora, the mess, to the party. Nora opened the giant Country Road bag and manifested a zip loc sandwich bag containing a clutch of tiny blue pills, each of which she pinched out with the same mechanical gesture as she’d held my Stalker DVD and placed gently on the tongue of each girl as though giving communion. I can’t remember which ones they were. This was that period, decades ago, when ecstasy would be branded, likely by the North Korean government in little pocked tablets, with brand names, Mitsubishi, Chanel, Louis Vuiton. I can’t remember which these were. But I can remember the tiny pale line and dusting of blonde hair between Nora’s navel and her pubic mound and for how many nights I’d think of it bloating and turning black. When she was done my girlfriend pointed pointedly at me and said, “He needs to loosen up, he’s being weird and awkward give him one.” I felt a sudden fist sized pang of anxiety in my chest. I actually love MDMA, I loved it then too, but I very much didn’t love the idea of doing it around these people, around that whole collapsing mess on the balcony, on the accelerating destruction of my house by strangers. I had a beer, that was enough, but back then, I didn’t have the self confidence to say what I really felt or thought. I just kind of tilted my head with overt uncertainty. Nora said, open your mouth and so I did, because a sub conscious part of me had already decided that whatever Nora said, I would do. Get in the coffin with me. She had that pill between her thumb and her forefinger, and that’s when I discovered the first of so many incredibly beautiful, magical things about her. She could do sleight of hand tricks. With cards, and coins, or really anything. She was a master shoplifter and thief. She snapped her fingers a second before they touched my tongue and that pill just disappeared, not up her sleeve, she wasn’t wearing sleeves. The girls clapped and cheered. “You’re going to have a fun night tonight.” My girlfriend said. And Nora winked at me. And I fell in love with her at that moment, in a way I didn’t love my girlfriend, who I was “in love” with. It was the moment I found out, as a young man, there was a whole other kind of love you could have for a woman, not as a mother, or a sister, or a lover, but something else. This sounds unbelievable but I woke up the next morning and that pill, was in my pocket.

Nora engaged in performative small talk with the girls until she said I need a drink and she looked at me and said you need a real drink as my girlfriend and her friends with lidded eyes reflected on their need for water as the pills kicked in. Nora took my hand, in a way that no one noticed, and took me back to the kitchen. She plonked that giant bag on the breakfast bar scattering empty and half empty beers cans all over the floor and unzipped it and took out a bottle of rye whiskey and a bottle of rum, and then started opening and closing cabinets in my kitchen, moving random party goers in and out of the way as she did so. She took my two best glasses, scooped ice out of the sink that someone had brought to keep beer cool with her hands, she took an old bag of sugar in the cabinet above my coffee machine and poured it in a pan with a splash of water and sparked the stove top, made simple syrup, and fixed me the greatest Old Fashioned I’ve ever had in my life.

You look like this is the kind of drink you drink. She said, not knowing that for the rest of my life it would be the kind of drink I’d drink. She tapped her glass against mine and we leaned against the sink and watched the party in silence for sips. What’s the point of all this. She said. Who even are these people. Maybe she said, or maybe I said, as we’d already started to occupy the locus between each others thoughts and mouths. I don’t know. I think I definitely said. We talked about Soviet era movies, then David Lynch, then industrial music, reasonably obscure books, occultism, the secret history of Sydney, Nora would make oblique references to things and if you got them, if you were initiated, she would touch her nose with her finger on one hand and snap her fingers with the other and point at you, like a pistol, like you got it. We got each other. We got everything. She gets nothing now.

Do you do cocaine she said. I had not, at that point, in my 20s. Or maybe I had, but it wasn’t really cocaine. Mystery white powders at parties. But I knew on some chthonic level, I was meant to do cocaine. I didn’t know, entirely at the time, but cocaine was to me what war was to Cormac McCarthy’s Judge, a reference that would earn Nora’s nose touch and pistol fingers. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. The ultimate drug, awaiting its ultimate user. What heroin was for Nora. What death was and is for Nora.

Another thing I’d learn about Nora, that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until years later, until I was fully formed, she had a rare and unique situational awareness, the kind serious intelligence operatives have. She clocked the second she walked into my house what a hundred losers hadn’t, that I actually had two bathrooms, one tucked next to the sliding mirror doors in the corner where my bed was. The party was thinning out by then. My girlfriend and her friends who I guess were Nora’s friends were sitting on the balcony rolling on Nora’s actually very good MDMA, there was a scattering of hardcore drunks and drug addicts but few others. Nora took me by the hand again and took me into the secret bathroom, slid the door closed, opened up the magic Country Road bag, and produced a 8 ball of cocaine from within.

She cut two fat lines of off white powder on the stark white porcelain of the sink in the ensuite. I took out a note and rolled it up, I knew how to do that much at least, she flipped down the lid of my toilet and sat on it, with the giant Country Road bag between her feet. I felt a weight of years descend upon me. I looked at it and knew, that was a big deal. I was about to drive down a path I couldn’t drive back up. I leaned down and snorted one line into my right nostril and threw my head back it tasted like diesel fumes and death death and life. I felt my eyes vibrate in their sockets and my teeth go numb, or at least, I felt extremely aware of the existence of my teeth in their sockets for the first time. Nora’s teeth are all that’s left.

That moment stretched out and dilated, in maybe minutes or dozens of minutes, and when my head lolled back to eye level, Nora had pulled her t shirt off over her head and over one arm, and dropped her short shorts to her ankles, her lingerie was British racing green and intricate, little flowers and mesh. Nora would always strip her clothes off before doing drugs. She had opened that black leather zip up purse on her bare thighs, in which were her, what a friend of mine years later would refer to as medicaments. Needle. Metal spoon. Various tiny plastic zip loc bags. Rubber tube, strapped around her arm, and bit between her teeth, syringe pinched between her fingers. She’d prepared that whole affair in the minutes I wasn’t paying attention, engrossed in the emergence, the becoming, of a man completely unlike the one I was before, that would define me for many years afterwards, the still does, in many ways. I watched transfixed as she spiked her vein and her blood mushroom clouded into the stopper, and plunged back in. Her face changed, the tension she held in her temples slackened and her eyes, big and green the near same shade as her bra and pants, rolled back, and her jaw dropped and drooped, and the party outside and all the noise and creaking balcony and giant albinos and rolling skanks and future government ministers and bad music and cigarette smoke and chaos all plunged into a tiny aural aperture like a thin whine, my ears were ringing, her ears were ringing, and the tiny ceramic lined room vibrated sharply, we weren’t looking at each other, but we were looking at each other, and I didn’t know what to say, there had been two lines cut up on the sink and I said hey, do you want one of these and her dead dead and nodded face cracked and lips curled into a smile a rictus grin, gestured that they’re for me and I suddenly realised in stark clarity that while Nora could make you feel at that primitive resonance you were on the same level we were not on the same level.

I watched her for a long time. A really long time. And I committed to memory every square inch of her in those moments, in my initiatory state. She was not classically beautiful, she had a swimmer’s frame and small unremarkable breasts but wide feminine hips despite her miniscule stature. Below her knees her legs were covered with thick blonde hair she never shaved, she took a deep breath through her nose, and she took her right arm, and hooked it over head, as the horse kicked her. She was the first woman I ever met who didn’t shave her armpits, and to this day, the sight of blonde armpit hair triggers in my reptilian hindbrain the exact same feeling, a whole of body dopamine reaction, something I never knew I wanted, but that I really wanted. I remember vividly how her hands ran down her face, and intimately clutched her neck, and ran down her sides, and how she relaxed in a way, in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human relax since. She’s relaxed now, asleep.

Ok I’m going to do this other line. I think I said, after a while, and years later I’d come to realize, I was never really addicted to cocaine, I was addicted to that memory, of bringing the note up to my nostril while my eyes were transfixed on Nora.

She tipped her head back so the nape of her neck was against the cistern of the toilet and the last words she said to me that night were this isn’t what it looks like, with the syringe still jutting out out of her arm, and she issued something I’d find out years later resembled a death rattle, I never got to hear her real one as the junk took her completely. Hey I said impotently. Hey! I repeated more forcefully, as she settled into an undead dead stillness. At this point in my life I’d never actually touched a half naked woman who wasn’t “my girlfriend” and so I gingerly poked her, on her temple, to test if she was still alive. She’s not. She inhaled aggressively, and rattled some more. Fuck. One or both of us said.

I was two lines deep into my first serious cocaine bender and a girl I’d just met and immediately fallen in love with had done heroin in my bathroom and passed out.

Nora started snoring, which was good, I reckoned, through a paranoid fog, since it meant she was breathing at least. Cocaine does a lot of things but the worst thing it does, is grant one clarity. And in that moment I was gifted with the clarity that my girlfriend’s “best friend” was half naked and unconscious with a needle in her arm and a tourniquet and her fix in her lap on my secret toilet and I was high and manifestly unequipped to deal with it. I poked her again. She snored louder. Cocaine does a lot of things but the best thing it does, is grant one the ability to concoct plans. Or rather, schemes. This would be my first coke fueled scheme. The first of many. I went to pull her shorts back up over hips then found the combination of alcohol and narcotics had rendered me materially retarded. I had to squat down, and steady myself, unsteady, against the glass door of the ensuite shower, to give Nora a degree of modesty. I took the needle out, gently, a bead of bright blood on her pale skin, put it back in a pouch in the purse where I assumed it went, where one still is, tiny bits of her still stuck to the slither of surgical steel. I pulled the t shirt back down over her chest. She was still snoring. No one saw me carry her back out over my shoulder, kick the bed back down on the floor, and tuck her under a blanket. The fix I slid under the strap of her bra so she wouldn’t lose it. I planted the bag down by her feet. Pulled the divider back across and switched off the light. Went back out onto the balcony. “Where’s Nora?” Nora’s a mess. Everyone nodded in a way they thought was sage.

Hours later, the party was over, I kept sneaking back, past Nora’s still corpse into the secret bathroom and snorting more coke. “You were fun tonight!” My girlfriend said, differently high, wrapping her arms around my neck and dancing slowly in front of the television. Later she straddled me in the bed, next to where Nora was curled in the corner. “Don’t worry about her. Dumb cunt won’t remember anything tomorrow.” We fucked with Nora sleeping next to us. Nora would remember everything tomorrow. Nora always remembered. Nora remembers nothing now. After my girlfriend went to sleep, between us, I reached my foot all the way across the bed past her, and touched my toe against Nora’s Achille’s heel. I remember doing it, unsure of why I was doing it. She rolled over and did the same thing, unconsciously. There was some force, something pulling us together.

She got up first the next day, slung the big bag over shoulder. Tapped my foot with hers as she fetched her fix from its spot under her bra and tucked it down the back of her shorts. She winked at me. That’s really when the affair started, intellectually, psychically at least.

It started physically a couple of weeks later, at Nora’s boyfriend’s house, which was nicer than mine, or anyone else’s. His balcony was smaller but he had a lap pool. He had two kitchens, one for the staff. Which is where Nora and I first kissed, or rather, attacked each other, in a fit, or a seizure of lust, biting and tearing at each other, the way the legions of the empire of dirt bit and tore at her through the box.

Someone opened the venetian door to the scullery kitchen at one point and we stopped like improvisational actors when someone calls freeze. And they took a bottle of soda water out of the fridge and left without acknowledging us. And we both erupted into laughter. Nora laughed masonically, in that there were multiple degrees of it starting with a simple Ha but at the ultimate degrees, she would double over, I saw her piss herself more than once,at the 33rd degree. I told her the Dealey Plaza joke in a tent when we were camping with my girlfriend and her boyfriend one freezing cold night in the Blue Mountains, so cold everyone had gone back to sleep in the cars, except Nora and I, who feigned being chemically comatose until everyone had gone, she commando crawled into my tent in the dark, covered in mud and grass and stripped naked and slid into the sleeping bag with me, she would mock them, her boyfriend, my girlfriend, about how fucking stupid they were, in the way illicit lovers do. I told her to keep her voice down. His car is soundproof, it’s probably fucking bulletproof. We should find out… Fucking ourselves warm but also out of unspoken anxiety that someone might check on us. You know, he gave my pussy a nickname. Biting my bottom lip not to laugh. What is it. She cupped her mouth with the inside of her elbow because she couldn’t not giggle at maximum volume. I can’t tell you its so bad.

You have to tell me now. I said, feigning seriousness.

He called it… his “strawberry shortcake”.

Jesus Christ. I said, burying my face in her neck, she wrapped her arms around me tight as we stifled each other’s laughter.

That sounds like something you’d read in a prosecution brief. Against a pervy uncle. One or both of us said, in my memory its me, but it could have been her, my sense of humour, her sense of humour, eternally indivisible, I don’t know where I start and she ends even now that she’s gone.

You have to give it a name now. She said, with utter seriousness.

Dealey Plaza. She snorted. Why?

No one will believe I just fired three shots in it. And she doubled, tripled, quadrupled over into the 33rd degree of laughter, so loud I reached around and covered her mouth with my hand, wrapped my arm around her belly and pulled her close, every muscle contracting, and she wouldn’t stop, so I reached down to make her do the only thing which she would do in total silence except lie in the coffin, but then I felt her underpants were soaked and so was the bottom half of the sleeping bag, which made me laugh, which made her laugh, and there was no hiding it or anything so I got out and got dressed and peered out of the tent to see the light on in the car. They’re awake. They know we’re awake. She got out and dressed in under 30 seconds. She opened up the giant Country Road bag, took out a bong and packed it, performatively unzipped the tent and exhaled, the weed covered the smell of piss, covered everything else.

“What are you guys doing?”

Her boyfriend asked, through the zip, big blonde grammar school Rugby bonce, one of those practiced elite faces that made it impossible to tell if he’d made us and was angry or had made us and didn’t care because Nora’s mother was as rich as his were and their relationship was largely economic.

We’re… going to Dealey Plaza. We’re going to kill JFK.

Dealey Plaza became our secret word, fat with power. Dealey Plaza was what we’d say when people at parties asked where we were going “for a smoke” or a line, or just to get away, when we were really fucking, pressed up against each other in a stranger’s shower stall, biting her bottom teeth fitting her entire jaw in my mouth. Dealey Plaza was our in joke. Knock knock who’s there Dealey Plaza, Dealey Plaza, where you go to get your brains blown out. Dealey Plaza, where the holes don’t line up. Dealey Plaza, where nothing is ever the same afterwards.

Nora and I told each other everything, which is why the Dealey Plaza joke was so funny to us. We didn’t tell each other everything in a confessional way, but in a cartographical way. As we realized how much like each other we both were, and how we’d both gone through our lives not knowing anyone like us, who liked the same things, who thought the same way, we started cataloguing each other’s histories in a way which was more explanatory than revelatory, we were trying to chart a course back to Cartesian 0. I’d told her about how after my sister died I’d become obsessed with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. How I’d made my parents, frozen in grief, take me to the video store weekend after weekend so I could rent Oliver Stone’s JFK, how I’d sit at the libraries reading books, about the cardboard boxes in my room full of pages I’d photocopied, my own personal Warren Commission. I was 11 years old. Nora told me how when she was 12 her father died she became obsessed with the first World War, obsessively reading books and letters from soldiers, and how she had concocted a fantasy in her mind that he hadn’t died from drink and a bad heart and too much rich food that all those business trips, his mistress, his other family, he was away fighting the war, and she’d write his letters home to her, telling her he missed her, I have some of them, in the notebooks in the box with the fix and the postcard and the screwed up funeral pamphlet. I don’t want you to be scared Nora, I am brave, and I’m not scared of dying, of the gas, and the tanks, and the Hun, I will come back to you.

At least yours makes sense, on some level. I said to her in bed one night, sharing a cigarette, flipping over the pages in the notepad. JFK doesn’t make sense. She hugged me and said grief doesn’t make sense.

Nora was the first person I ever talked about my sister to. My girlfriend knew I had one, knew there was a story there, knew there was something that had happened to me as a child that had taken to me like a chisel and carved me into the person she knew. But for some reason I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or never found a moment in which to talk about it with her. I told Nora about it the first night we slept together.

We’d conspired to get a night alone together, it was a week after my birthday, my parents had sent me a bottle of very expensive whisky, kind that comes in a box, I’d opened it and poured us a glass around the glass table in my kitchen she was crouched cross legged half naked getting ready to shoot up and I was cutting a line on the glass and she said that seems like an only child present but you don’t seem like an only child, you talk to women like you have sisters.

And for some reason that statement hit me like an earthquake and buried me under psychic rubble and I stopped what I was doing, which was rolling up a note, and I said, I had a sister and she stopped what she was doing, the needle had already spiked the vein, and she looked up at me, and slowly slid it out tell me about her, and I told her everything.

About how Maria was born two years after me, with an exquisitely rare genetic illness called Fanconi’s Anemia, how her life expectancy without a bone marrow donor was about 10, only a bit more if we found one. How she was my only friend because although I got weirder after she died, I was still pretty fucking weird when she was alive, and so was she, she looked different, because of the illness, that causes a whole raft of congenital deformities, Maria only had 7 fingers, four on one hand 3 on the other. Her skin was dark from aberrant melanocytes. She got bullied in school because she had to wear a bicycle helmet because a single bruise could kill her. She had learning difficulties as they call them. Her favourite movie was All Dogs Go To Heaven but her favorite Disney princess was Ariel the Little Mermaid. She liked eating oysters. She needed a blood transfusion every 72 hours to live. Her weird obsessions were ballet and Catholicism, she was named after the Ave Maria which the nuns at the hospital were singing when she was born and she collected little statues of Mary from the hospitals she’d get sent to, even though she was baptised Church of England. No one ever told me she was going to die, that her fate was fixed, by genetics and circumstance. I was too dumb to figure it out a couple of years earlier when the Make A Wish Foundation sent her to see the Bolshoi. I was too dumb to figure it out that we used to go on Camp Quality trips every year. No one told me she was going to die. And everyone ignored me since I wasn’t going to die, I didn’t need fresh blood every couple of days, I was a supporting character in the life changing tragedy that would shunt everyone’s existence on a new trajectory. I didn’t resent it, when it was happening, but I came to resent it, deeply, in the years afterwards. But there was really nothing to do be done about it by then.

I told Nora all this, and she didn’t move, and she stayed cross legged on the chair and listened, still half naked, the needle on the table by then, arms folded across her flat chest. I told her parts that I’d never told anyone, about the night Maria died, she’d got car sick on the drive home from our holiday house, we had a van and I’d wanted to change seats with her, because I didn’t like it driving backwards, in the front seat facing the back. And we drove for about 45 minutes and she started vomiting, car sick, but it wasn’t really car sick, she’d had an aneurysm, her brain had started bleeding, and because of the disease it would never stop. How I thought after she was dead I’d done it somehow, by making her change seats, stupid kid logic.

I told Nora about the last 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes of Maria’s life. How she gripped the bed sheets in the hospital in tiny little deformed hands balled into fists with her eyes closed tight like she was waging a war against death itself. Told Nora how that’s why I have nothing but contempt for people who campaign for euthanasia laws. Imagine how strong you have to be. As a child. To hold on and fight death like that. Nora started crying then, not, performatively, just a couple of tears down her cheeks. I tried to lighten the mood. It’s like in Blade Runner. I want more life, fucker. She snapped her fingers and touched her nose. We were something more than lovers after that. We were more than in love after that.

But loving Nora meant loving more than just Nora, five nothing in her underwear, a free wheeling mess of French philosophy and memorized poetry and movie quotes, and sex and disarming openness and jokes and artistic passion and excellent taste. Loving Nora meant, loving heroin. Which I never found out the absolute truth of but I suspect she’d been using since she started high school.

It wasn’t all romance and self discovery we fought. I broke it off, once, after she showed up to my office and asked me to look after a couple of grams of junk for her because her mother was making her go home for a week to get clean. She wanted to hide it in my fucking office. I said I’m done c’mon man. And she said, c’mon man! One day we’ll go to Dealey Plaza together, you’ll fuck my brains out in the book depository. Get it? Fuck my brains out. My. Brains. Out.

Her brains are gone now.

The second time I broke it off was she got an apartment near my girlfriend’s in a fit of likely drug induced hyper organisation, which is something heroin addicts do, when they aren’t asleep, few know this now since heroin addiction is so rare. I was in bed, with my girlfriend, who by then I absolutely didn’t love but who was still Nora’s best friend, ostensibly. Nora messaged her and said she had a giant spider in her bathtub and she was freaking out, and could she send me across the road to kill it. Two spiders! The last text said, urgently. My girlfriend prodded me awake and showed me. I think by that point there was a seed of suspicion planted in her, from the way she looked at me. “Nora’s a fucking mess!” she said. “Go deal with the spider so I can go to sleep.”

The two spiders were two drug dealers, the kind that wear tracksuits and baseball caps and have bum bags, and rattish countenances. Nora answered the door in her bra and panties and they were both sitting around her kitchen table, doing that thing nervous men do where one of their legs bounces up and down. There were various medicaments on the table. Nora mouthed they won’t leave and I sized them up, erroneously, I was considerably bigger than them and thought I could take them, if necessary, in that way men will think to themselves I can take them, until they hit 30, and they know you can probably not take them and I said, guys its time to go and a babble of maggoty drug dealer protestations uttered forth from their mealy mouths overfilled with bad teeth. There was money involved, with the equation, and neither Nora and I had it. This is so long ago I still lived pay to pay, fortnight to fortnight, and Nora lived day to day, on gratis and tick and the contents of the giant Country Road bag. I took a couple of steps toward the one sitting down with the bouncing leg in what I was concentrating so intently on being an intimidating fashion that the second one, was out of my eyeline, and a few seconds later I would find out, had maneuvered around behind me with an empty bottle of Jim Beam that he was about to smash on the back of my skull.

It’s unbelievable how much blood is stashed in the skin under your scalp. This has happened to me a few times, and every time it surprises me. It was like a waterfall down my neck and it ran all the way under my shirt to my arse crack. There was skull blood pooling around my balls.

I spun around and rounded on the guy, thinking the rhythmic heuristic that has saved my life in so many serious scuffles over the years:

Never punch, Never Kick,

Thumb in eye, knee in dick.

I drove my knee into the little weasel’s crotch and stabbed my thumb into his maxilla like it was a knife, his eyeball didn’t pop out, like it can do, but he squealed satisfactorily and covered his face and scurried away. The other one just jumped up kicking over the chair and ran for the door, which I’d stupidly locked behind me when I walked in, so now they’re fumbling around the knob and adjudicating whether or not the path of least resistance is getting out or ganging up on me. I became acutely aware in that instant that I had a concussion and about, a minute and a half before I wasn’t going to be combat effective. I doubled back into Nora’s kitchen, of course she didn’t have a knife block, Nora hated cooking, hated eating really, I pinballed from the fridge to the stove, to the kitchen drawers in a zig zag because my sense of direction was already rattled by blunt force trauma, and blood loss. In the top drawer was one of those wood handled steak knives Nora had very obviously stolen from a bar or restaurant but it was the biggest and most intimidating blade she had so I grabbed that and stormed back towards them, holding the knife out like a spear.

In retrospect, I feel bad for the guy I kneed and eye gouged because his compatriot got the door open, went out it, then pulled it closed behind him. I could hear his sketchy drug dealer sneakers squeaking on the tiles outside as he ran out and down the fire stairs. So now one eyed rat boy was alone, with a half naked heroin addict they’d been trying to hustle, and a six two three hundred pound Tasmanian with a stolen steak knife and bloody balls who’d been woken up by his girlfriend to go kill a spider. And he’s the dumb fucking spider.

He put his hands up, like he was under arrest, and I grabbed the back of his neck and took the tip of the blade and pressed it into his black eye. If it was a movie, if it was a different ending I would have said something cool like, how much money does she owe you and he would have gone to say like six hundred dollars and then I’d press the blade harder into the contusion and he’d say she doesn’t owe us any money! And then I’d kick him out the door. But it didn’t happen like that. I didn’t say anything. You never do, in real life. And for a second, or two seconds, I was going to cut that eye out just because I was angry, and I wanted to. He started crying. I don’t know what it was that stopped me, and I’ve never known, the few times things like that have happened. He looked pathetic, maybe it was that. I know when I woke up the next morning my face was sore in the way it gets when I’ve been smiling too much. And I can only imagine how horrific I looked to him, in those minutes, and I’m ashamed of it but also, I’d by lying if I said I wasn’t a little proud.

When they were both gone I went back into the kitchen and ran water on the knife and put it back in the drawer. And I pulled my shirt off over my head and dropped it on the kitchen tiles and the whole thing was soaked with my blood and the back of my head stung, the cut was right on the line above my occipital bone, there’s still a scar there. I’d almost forgot Nora was there until she said that needs stitches and I screamed, high on adrenalin I CAN’T GO BACK WITH STITCHES YOU DON’T GET STITCHES FROM FUCKING SPIDERS.

The way Nora looked at me was different from the way rat boy had looked at me when he thought I was going to kill him, there was fear there, enormous fear, but arousal too. That’s the thing I remember most about that year, with Nora, learning about new emotions, new combinations of emotions, things I didn’t think could exist, the way my girlfriend would look at me after Nora died with contempt and sympathy, the way Nora looked at me with fear and longing, how I’d felt when I’d told her about my sister with relief but deep sadness. I have glue! She said, snapping her fingers decisively.

We went into her bathroom, because a fresh trickle of blood was running out the back of my head every few heart beats, and my heart was beating fast. I sat on her toilet, the way she’d sat on mine the first time I saw her shoot up, and held my hair up while she dabbed it with a towel and pinched the skin together and tried to close it with super glue.

You don’t even have a fucking bathtub. I said. She laughed. Maybe a 23rd degree laugh.

I told Nora we were done, she said, I get it, and I had a couple of days of peace. I had a good job. I had a good girlfriend. I had a network. I was becoming something. The last thing I needed was a hellion junky pulling stunts like that. I get it. She’d say. But I missed her terribly. And I’d try to be present with my girlfriend, who did or did not suspect something had happened in the period of our emotional distance. But I’d be thinking about the way Nora laughed, or thinking about something I wanted to tell her, a book I wanted her to read, a painting I wanted to show her. At the time it seemed tortured but I’d trade instantly the nights spent thinking about the way I fucked Nora that I couldn’t fuck anyone else for the nights later where I couldn’t sleep thinking about Nora rotting in her coffin, with the bugs eating her beautiful eyes, with the fat of her perfect thighs melting.

My boss back then, one of the best men I’d ever known, he called me into his office around then and said you’re not OK with total authority. We locked eyes for a long time, and traded bursts of encrypted emotional information, me telling him exactly how not OK I was and he, a lot older than me, and a man who’d done a lot and seen a lot, telling me he knew exactly how it was. We didn’t have to say a word to know.

I want you to take a week off. Full week. Annual leave. You’ve never taken any you have heaps, will be good for you. Get your shit together.

It was a Friday, I got home and told my girlfriend I was taking a week of annual leave. She didn’t really care about my job she had her own. She was flying to London the next week. The thought of a whole week to myself. Really, to myself, seemed immensely healing. No Nora, no lying, just silence and big breakfasts and books and movies and maybe I’d go see my actual friends I neglect, a whole week, to myself, is what I needed.

“Nora got kicked out of her house, she needs somewhere to crash for a couple of days.” My girlfriend uttered absent mindedly as she was packing her suit case on Monday morning, as I woke up after my first sleep in, in a decade, as my week off started.

I’m sorry, what?

“Yeah she’s a mess. Whatever happened with that spider anyway?”

I bolted upright in bed and watched her potter around, taking clothes, dresses, shoes, putting them in her bag. I don’t want Nora here. I thought. I want Nora here. I thought. Flashes of stolen steel and fear and glue and blood and longing. Dealey Plaza. Three gunshots. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Jackie Onassis reaching back over the trunk of the Cadillac to scoop up her husband’s brains. The President is dead, let us pray.

She had me in checkmate. I couldn’t protest more vigorously without admitting there were reasons I didn’t want Nora around beyond her just being her generic wastrel friend and I couldn’t admit that there was a yawning hungry mouth in my soul desperate for her to be here, to be with me. I had nothing left but juvenile passive aggression. I huffed.

Nora arrived, with her giant bag, right as my girlfriend was leaving that morning. Oh my god thank you darling thank you so much mwamwamwamwa she said to my girlfriend, and as the two women hugged each other, Nora looked over my girlfriend’s shoulders at me, with lidded eyes. Nora and I would sneak away during the day to watch movies together. It was around that time Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out, we saw it together. There’s a thoroughly asexual woman who plays Lucifer in that movie. Nora, predictably, fell in love with her. She kind of looks like Nora. She actually could quote the lines in Aramaic. The way Nora looked at me that morning was like Gibson’s Satan regarding Christ in the garden. Do you really believe that one man can bear the full burden of sin?

When my girlfriend had left Nora dumped her bag on the couch and crossed her arms this is not what it looks like she said, not for the first time. Oh really? Because it looks like you’re fucking with me.

I really do need a place to stay.

And I need…

I trailed off. The last word was peace? Or her. Or nothing. There’s moments in your life where time has no meaning, where was and when come crashing in on each other. Maybe I knew in that moment she would die. Maybe my memory of it is different to how it really happened, but she’s gone, and there’s no one to ask, no one that hasn’t melted into dirt. Maybe I wanted to go all the way back to the beginning and make different choices. Or maybe I knew nothing could be changed and I just wanted to feel what I felt for her as much as I could, before I couldn’t. I had plans, I was going to lay down ground rules, but she did that thing where she casually enters your personal space like she was never meant not to be there, and she steps up onto the couch so she can reach her arms around my neck, and she kisses me and my girlfriend hasn’t even walked out of the elevator to the ground floor at this point.

We fucked quickly with our clothes on and when she started stripping hers off I knew she wanted to shoot up so I stopped.

Do you have any coke? I asked. I brought some special. She said, taking out a fat bag, like an apology, maybe she really didn’t have anywhere to stay. It was like 9am in the morning. I didn’t have the appetite for it. I put it down on the coffee table. She started fixing her shot. She paused, as she was scooping the junk onto the spoon with her only long finger nail. Do you want some of this? She asked, not for the first time, although she knew my views on it. I don’t like to sleep at all, let alone, chemically assisted. I like stimulants. I like alcohol. I like being in control. I like to be the one holding the knife, I don’t like to let the knife plunge into me, like she did.

I thought about my fucking girlfriend. I thought about what ever nebulous reasons I’d come up with for not doing it. I thought about my week off. I thought about Nora, and I thought about how much I loved her, and how that love was an ever present desire to get closer to her, to know how she thought, what she was thinking, because in a way it was the only method to ever know what I thought, what I was thinking. And I thought, fuck it.

Really? She said, and it was the only time in the whole time I knew her she exhibited the faintest uncertainty. Really. She took a second needle out of the purse and I put my hand on hers No and she looked at me, and exhaled loudly, she drew up mine first in her syringe, not as much as she’d usually do, I don’t remember, what black line on the syringe it actually was, I remember her spit and the spoon and the fire and small pain in the crook of my arm. And I remember the whole world closing in on me, like I was being wrapped in the warmest, most comforting blanket. And I remember the pressure on my arm from the tourniquet fading as she tied one on her self, and her laying down on top of me, with her hands on my face, I remember closing my eyes, and letting her take whatever was happening to me, maybe me doing it for the first time, she could absorb it like it was her first time. Heroin has a prologue, in your liver, and it flows up and out through your whole body like a thousand hands hugging you, until it gets to your brain, and it kisses your forehead, or maybe that was Nora.

That, that feeling, when you first do it, that isn’t the reason anyone does heroin. That’s what no one tells you. The movies, from the 90s about it, they don’t tell you that. The needle goes in the drugs go in but in real life, that’s not when the euphoria hits. The euphoria is waking up, from the best sleep you ever had, with all the energy you’ll ever need, like you’d been dead and now you’re alive, like you’re only just realizing what life even really is. And you want more.

Nora and I lived like that for two days, in ecstasy. But when she drew up another hit, that had been getting exponentially, logarithmically bigger each time, I became acutely aware of the fact, each subsequent dose was not like the last. I appreciated extremely quickly what the phrase chasing the dragon really meant. You build up a tolerance for heroin starting the second time you do it. While I’d been asleep I’d dreamed of Maria on a morphine drip as she died, and an idea, a concept, had formed in my mind about my relationship to opiates that I have to this day. This is what you do when you die. Heroin is dancing around the edge of death. Heroin is euthanasia tourism. Heroin is a little taste of what’s coming. For everyone. And maybe because of my own experiences with death, I appreciated that, and decided there was a time and a place for it. She went to tap out another grain from the bag in the spoon for me and I grabbed her wrist and said no. And her lips quavered.

It’s fine. It’s fine. She said. Getting up off the couch that had been our cocoon for a couple of days. Finefinefinefinefine. She went into my kitchen, put her hands on her naked hips and looked at the fridge. Then the sink. Then a cupboard. Like she was trying to find something to do with herself. Something normal. I’m not saying for you to stop I just want to stop. I said. Getting up as well, a sharp pain in the small of my back from inactivity, muscles learning to move again. She shot me a look that wasn’t quite angry but said are you too good for me, for my addiction, which was already well and truly passé by that year, only a few months before the beginning of the Sydney heroin drought that would get everyone else off it in short order.

No, I just don’t want to do it. I said, still a bit foggy from the last hit to articulate all the reasons why. I got close to her and she collapsed in on herself, crouched on the kitchen floor, and started crying. But I have to do it. She said between long sobs, her wet face contorted in a way like a corpse’s might be, Nora’s face in the middle stages of decomposition, skin stretched taut over mortuary prosthetics with thin blue lips curled into a snarl. And her eyes open, milky white and empty, in the coffin, and Nora says “Is this really how it happened, John?” with one of her forensically painted on public viewing eyebrows raised.

I stop my slow cautious approach to contemporaneous Nora, small and naked and crying, as the dead Nora I see when I close my eyes speaks directly at me. I don’t know what to say because I never expected this to happen.

Corpse Nora sits up out of the coffin, from where it orbited my minds eye, an intrusive oblong satellite that dips in and out of my atmosphere. She turns her head, further than a person can, dead muscle contorting two hundred degrees to look at my idea of Real Nora, crying because I didn’t want to keep getting high with her.

“This ending sucks.” Corpse Nora says, walking through and past me to sit on the couch, lighting a cigarette. She materializes my notebook, one of her old notebooks, in her hands and starts flicking through pages. “There are five of these and this is absolutely the weakest I can’t believe this is the one you nearly committed to print.”

This is the best one! I yell, feeling like I need to yell, the way everything is exaggerated when you dream. The room, the kitchen, everything is like swimming through treacle, being taken out of what was and when, the act of writing, the act of remembering, operates on different timescales, and Corpse Nora’s intercession has disrupted it, making everything hard to move through. We’re in a moment between moments that happened and didn’t happen and could have happened. “It sucks.” She says decisively, dismissively. I reach down slowly, painfully slowly, and I touch Real Nora’s hair on the kitchen floor, scratch my finger nails along her scalp. Why wouldn’t I want to do this, now I’m doing it. “That’s not Real Nora by the way.” She says, crossing her dead legs, not really answering me.

“All the italicised mental intrusions, me in the box, me rotting, me disappearing, you’re not fooling anyone. It’s obvious you went back later and added them. It’s cheap. It’s contrived. Also completely incongruous with this ending, where I don’t even die.” She says, immensely pleased with herself, folding her arms. She’s not even wearing tattered funeral formal dress anymore, she’s not even blue and black and bloated anymore, she’s wearing the British racing green lingerie from the first time we met and she’s glowing and smug and self satisfied. It wasn’t going to be entirely clear you didn’t die. I try vainly to defend myself. I need a drink. I all but forget Real Nora on the floor, flash frozen with trauma and anguish. I open up the fridge and get myself a beer.

Corpse Nora flips the notepad back open, in an accusatory fashion. “I’m going to tell you how I don’t really want to be a heroin addict, a fact I only realize, and this is the most offensive part, because you say you don’t want to do any more heroin.” Her eyes bore into me, her head dips, her eyebrow curls up brutally. “Seriously? You got through the whole thing without trying to make yourself seem sympathetic and you go and ruin it like that?” I’m disappointed in you, her clicking tongue makes abundantly clear.

“Actually that’s not the worst part, the worst part is this, the, what even is this John, a fucking montage? You were going to do a hallucinatory montage of you trying to help me get clean using vague instructions on kicking junk from William S Burroughs novels and then I’d live happily ever after, you were going to do a bait and switch at the end, Nora is alive, Nora has a good job now, you haven’t heard from Nora in years but you hope she’s doing well?!?! Pathetic. And most of the people who read this shit know you and know that isn’t true.”

I have nothing. “You’re not even a good enough writer to pull that off in a screenplay let alone,” and she casts her hand around dismissively across the psychic environment we’re occupying “Whatever even this is. It’s not long enough for a novel, it’s too long for a novella.”

I take a long suck from the imaginary beer can. Cast my eyes back at Real Nora, flickering, in between her literal future, her figurative past, passed, a crossroads. There’s five in there which one do you like then, if you’re the fucking expert.

“Well obviously I like the truth.” She says, holding up the notepad so I can see it. “But the truth is one sentence. And from the way you wrote it, and re wrote it, and scrawled it so many times like a schizo, I can tell you don’t like it.”

For a second, Real Nora’s face is frozen, freeze frame, her wet eyes looking at me, begging, for something none of us can articulate.

What’s your second favorite then.

“Honestly, I like the one where I’m not even real. I like the one where it’s heavily implied you had a mental breakdown and you made this whole thing up, made up cheating on the one woman you could have ever married to explain why the relationship ended and then you created me out of thin air as a literary device to help you work through your unresolved trauma about losing your sister. It’s the most interesting. And I’m not such a whiny weak bitch at the end of it.”

I thought it was too much like A Beautiful Mind, you know the way all John Forbes Nash’s schizophrenic hallucinations don’t impact the environment, how they don’t leave marks, the way I did that with you how there were things you could have only done and known if you weren’t real, I thought it was a bit on the nose.

Corpse Nora’s contemptuous face cracks into a smile and she snaps her finger up to her nose and points at me and clicks her fingers. “YES!” She yells. “I see what you mean now. The bathroom when we first met that only I knew about. How I knew your favorite drink. The magic Country Road bag. Also I don’t know if you meant to do this but the Héloïse and Abelard quote it’s completely unbelievable an actual woman would say something like that.”

Corpse Nora laughs to herself. “If you actually took some time and put some rigor into it, that could have worked.”

Well now you’re here which one is it going to be?

“Well I can’t live, I’d never forgive you for that. And the mental breakdown scenario is going to force you to confront some things about yourself I don’t think you really want to. Suicide, is right out. The one where it turns out I have cancer, and I’m too proud and cool to tell anyone, and it calls back to the story you tell me about your sister - that’s actually pretty good but it has echoes of that whole Sick Lit thing. Which even I was alive for, and it sucked.”

I keep sucking on the imaginary beer can. Corpse Nora, now liminal Nora regards me with an expression that’s sympathy, annoyance, longing, bemusement. A whole spectrum of feelings I didn’t think anyone could feel at the same time.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. If you’re looking for some catharsis that’s all there is. And nothing has to be in the exact order it happened. You told me this once, how much you loved stories that start in media res.” Corpse Nora gets up off the couch, and gets so close to me I can feel the heat off her even though she’s a completely fictious entity, an engram, a dream.

“Isn’t this how you’ve lived your whole life, skipping over the bad and boring parts? Isn’t this how you’ve got through everything you’ve ever been through? You don’t even owe anyone the truth, least of all me. You don’t owe me truth, you just owe me honesty.”

Corpse Nora wraps her arms around me. Real Nora flickers and blinks out of existence. So does the whole kitchen. The couch where we may or may not have made our nest that week. The building that may or may not have existed. It’s just us, alone. She puts her head against my chest, the notepad is in her hands again. “There’s only one paragraph in all this turgid nonsense that’s real from here on in. Get that out of yourself, like an exorcism, and wrap the whole thing up.”

She’s right. Everything else was a sad attempt at creating a narrative to say this one thing I wanted to get out of myself, up and out of myself. That’s what all writing is. An exorcism. Squeezing a pimple. Cutting out a tumour. The tumour Nora may or may not have had. The thing Nora had inside herself that could only get out with junk. The thing I have inside of myself. She’s laughing in the sleeping bag that night she pissed herself you need therapy we’re laughing at 5am when I have to be at work at 7am this is is therapy.

She asks me, Real Nora that is, after I told her about my sister, if I’d ever read Nabakov’s Lolita. She tells me that I’m like Hubert Hubert, except, he was broken by losing his first love as a child. But I didn’t lose my first love. I lost my sister. And that’s the reason I can’t have a serious relationship. That’s why I can’t be with a woman, the way they want me to be with them. Because I didn’t lose my first love, I lost my sister. And I’m going through my life not looking for a lover, a wife, I’m looking for a sister. And the thing she never had time to say was Nora wasn’t my lover, as much as we loved each other, she was my sister, and I lost her too. That’s the only real and brutally honest thing I was trying to get out by writing about her. Real Nora blinks and is gone. Corpse Nora melts into the dirt. Only the things they taught me remain and I feel I have to carry this with me, into forever, alone.

Nora died a few weeks after that, of an accidental overdose. I didn’t try to help her get clean, in fact we were fucked up that entire week. The last two days she stopped, of her own volition, and we went on a cocaine bender together to get her out the other side of it before her Mum picked her up and took her home. My girlfriend got back a few days later, after I’d slept solidly and worked the junk and blow and longing back out of my system. Then one day I got home and my girlfriend was sitting on the couch, with four of her friends, in their corporate girlboss Carla Zampatti jumpsuits in varying floral prints bawling their eyes out. Nora was a mess. They were saying. I asked what was wrong. Nora’s dead. One said. My girlfriend was crying the hardest. She’d been friends with Nora since they were toddlers. I maintained my impassive composure as merely my girlfriend’s boyfriend, with no emotional investment in Nora at all, and I dropped my bag and I took off my jacket. I nodded and sympathized, and began walking toward the bedroom, it occurred to me I only had a few steps left, before I broke down. I let out a bloody sob before I opened the door to the bedroom, which I hoped no one heard. I started crying quietly when I closed the door but knew it would get louder. I worried my girlfriend would come in and find me. I lay down on the floor and rolled under the bed and hid, and I took a pair of socks and stuffed them into my mouth so I could sob in silence. Someone did come in, at some point, to use the bathroom. I waited until my girlfriend’s friends left before I came out. The thing I said at the beginning, about the day after the funeral when she found out I’d been sleeping with Nora, that was when it was vocalized, proved. But she knew then, I think. I sat on the couch with her and held her as she cried. At some point she told me you’re a shitty boyfriend, but you’re a good friend. Years later it would occur to me what she meant like a brother. I asked her when the funeral was. She looked at me then, and an expression passed across her face, a fleeting opportunity to stick a knife deep in my heart, that she didn’t take advantage of as much as she wanted to. Friday. I would like it if you came too.

After a week of sobriety Nora had driven from her mother’s house in the Hunter Valley to Newcastle and bought smack from someone she hadn’t bought it from before, and she’d got a room at a hotel. And she’d shot it up without knowing it wasn’t really heroin, it was uncut desomorphine, and it killed her so quickly she didn’t have time to call anyone, or panic or even make a sound. They found her the next day at 11am when the cleaners came in. I didn’t need to see the police report to know they found her in her underwear. There was a brief investigation. There was a notice in the local country paper, taken suddenly, like early 21st century heroin overdoses were something random, that could happen to anyone, and I cried the hardest when I saw that, her life reduced to a single column inch. When I knew it contained infinities.

The funeral was more or less the same size as the party at my house when Nora and I first met, the same crowd, and like that party, I’d never felt more alone, even though I’d find out later everyone there knew I’d been secretly sleeping with her for six months. In one of those other endings I wrote, that Corpse Nora appeared and mocked me for, I cast her boyfriend as a kind of villain in the whole thing, but the truth was he and I would end up being something resembling friends, after a night years later on the gas where I confessed to him what happened, and we realized he and I were the only two people in the world who understood all Nora’s complexity. Jealousy, sympathy, and utter understanding, was how he looked at me. Nora kept teaching me new emotions, long after she died.

At the wake, Nora’s mother came up next to me and gently held my hand, and said, exactly as Nora had, when I first met her, “You’re John.” And she took me into Nora’s room, that I’d never seen. It looked exactly like my room, as a teenager. The same posters. Mess. Nora’s a mess. There were three Moleskin diaries on her desk that her mother put her fingers on, you’re in these. Along with her father. Along with… other things, that I can’t put into words, but that she did. And there was her fix, the black leather wallet, in a police evidence bag. Her mother asked if there was anything I wanted, apart from the diaries. I took the Dealey Plaza postcard I’d ordered off ebay, as a joke, off the wall next to her bed. And then I touched the fix in the evidence bag, rubbed my thumb down it, through the plastic. Her mother burst into tears, and she came across the room and embraced me. I don’t know what to do with that. I’d like it if you took it. That’s how I ended up with it. I knew, which the police didn’t, that there was a secret compartment in there, that Nora kept her smack in. That’s how I ended up with it, the .3 of a gram left, that took her life. That’s gone now, dissolved, like her.

“It’s the worst ending.” Nora says, spinning away from me, the way women do, when they know you’re watching them and maybe we’re at a party or camping or in a secret room or someone’s scullery kitchen and she’s twirling, happy, like she’s being watched. “It’s absolutely the worst ending.”

I could have done better, if I had tried. And she grabs my shirt, like she did that night on the roof when I showed her the secret Scientologists, and she kisses my neck, like she did the first time we met, and she says no you couldn’t have.

It’s ten years later and I’m in Dealey Plaza, and I go on the book depository tour. The window is all glassed up you can’t get close enough to judge for yourself if Oswald could have really taken the shot, let alone three. And tears are streaming down my face and the tour guide thinks it’s because I must really have believed in the whole liberal democratic project of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I get blind drunk at a bar in the middle of town and end up back there, and I walk down the middle of the road, tracing the path the motorcade took, and there’s nothing, and there’s no catharsis, but for the first time the coffin is empty, and instead for a fleeting second, they’re in another place, like sisters.