The gun to his head bothers him exceptionally little, he glances idly around the room as the pistol quivers at his skull. She holds the weapon with a loose laziness; it’s almost falling through her fingers.
“Marianna, what the hell?” he asks with a tired irritation in his voice, cigarette between his lips. He flicks a cheap lighter, cupping his hands around the flame.
“I’m thinking about killing you.” she answers musingly like she was considering the choices on a menu.
“And why would such a pretty girl want to chance splattering her dress with my blood?” usually a compliment can diffuse her but his flattery is so conviction-less it edges on sarcasm.
It’s a lie anyway; Marianna with her straw hair and flat feet is at best, average. She has a ruddy Slavic heaviness to her, as if she were tethered to the ground. She’s the modern echo of an Old World peasant, unmoving, unbreakable. Marianna knows how to survive in a grating world there’s resistance in her blood. She could stare straight at the face of adversity and spit into it.  But she has a uniquely American destructiveness with her needles and knives. This force is forever at odds with her steady stubbornness, the sea pounding on a rock. The outside world is a meager foe compared to the turmoil within herself. With her glossy eyes and hot blood she is burning herself away from the inside out. A solid self and a fractured mind, a damning combination.
“Oh, it might be worth it. I’ve never killed a man before and I think of all people you would be the least offended.”
He hears the gun cock and he takes a long drag and taps the ash away on the wooden arm of the chair. You could tell everything you needed to know about Matt by the way he smokes. He smokes because it doesn’t matter. He cuts years off his life because time kept ticking if he was a part of it or not. He fills his lungs with smoke because the past is rotting and the future is nothing so why should he care? He is slowly scorching his life away the same way cigarettes burn, the meaningless ash of memories collecting on the ground. It’s a life of cheap tricks and hang overs. The universe stares at him with empty eyes but Matt has long since quit staring back. In short, Marianna is right. If she killed him, Matt wouldn’t hold it against her.
He rolls his eyes at her and tips his head back against the gun pressed onto the back of his head, blowing a cloud of flimsy smoke up at her with a vague defiance, he shuts his eyes, unperturbed that if the mood struck her, his brain would be reduced to a bloody mess splattered on the tacky wallpaper.
“Whatever you want, pretty girl.”
A silent moment falls before she sighs like a disappointed child.
“This is boring.” She drops the gun to the floor as if it were nothing. It clatters loudly on the scuffed wooden floor.
Matt trails Marianna with a sort of apathetic loyalty that’s mostly born of habit. Matt tolerates her, with all her strange moods and empty threats because it’s an easy thrill and he likes drunken kisses and watching the way she’s destroying herself. Although, moments like these are not the reason he sticks around. It’s vastly more interesting watching her inflict herself on others.
“I love you.” she says with a smile, no sign that she had been pointing a gun at his head just a moment ago. “You’re cold.” He stares absently out the window, watching frightened pigeons fly off the asphalt and listening more to the muffled murmur of voice outside, barely listening to her.
Sometimes, Marianna liked to pretend that they’re in love but they both know the lie in it. She’s a bittersweet lover, all biting and dominance and a silent sadness.
Matt knows that they are both impossible to love in any sort of healthy way. They refused it. Marianna has an inherent fragility, a structural weakness within her that rejected anything more tender then neutrality. She could weather any hatred but kindness brought her to her knees. That’s why she likes him, he’s cold. He barely keeps her in mind.
Matt found affection somewhat uncomfortable, all sugar sweet smiles and gooey eyes. Very few people can melt into love very prettily, the rest just dissolved into a sugar water mess. Matt is jaggedly desirable, with cutting bones and messy hair, a carelessly ruffled handsomeness. He had made plenty of girls fall at his feet. But never Marianna, which is part of the reason he tolerates her. Marianna never melts, she can’t love. But, on the other hand, neither can he.
Matt had been born and bred in apathy and continued the tradition. He was from a highway town that stayed alive on fast food joints and hotels for motorists passing through to places more interesting. These towns cling to life on the interstate and they bloom and wilt on the whim of the Federal Highway Commission. In the cars zooming through, his hometown invokes a Midwestern nostalgia of simpler times and better people but on any closer examination these little towns are mostly crumbling brick and welfare checks.
He was not a native and that makes him a rarity, most of the people there had lived generations on the same dirt. His parents were refugees of the Iran-Iraq war. They had fled Tehran on borrowed funds after their apartment had been leveled by an Iraqi shell, a casualty of the War of the Cities. His hawk eyed mother stood on the street, her child clutched close to her, staring into the rubble that hid six bodies under crushed concrete and smoke.
“We are leaving” her words are iron as she looks back to her husband. They pack up what little they can salvage and are gone without a trace by the morning, leaving behind only rushed goodbyes. They arrive in America without language or skills and no other options. Their difficulties are further compounded by poor timing, it’s the height of the Reagan years and they stand out particularly starkly against the blinding red-white and blue of rabid patriotism.  They are expected at every opportunity to reaffirm their loyalty to their new nation and renounce their old homeland as inferior, lesser in all ways. Any waver of devotion is treachery of the blackest kind. The whole idea is so ridiculous that it should be funny but unwavering earnestness makes it thoroughly obscene.
His father adapted to it for survival sake, attending baseball games and block parties but his mother was old stock in her dark hijab and downcast gaze. She had been a revolutionary, standing under the white marble slope of Azadi Tower. She is staunch in her belief in god and country and she didn’t convert to the cult of stars and stripes.
She almost never left their little house, staying behind locked doors and drawn windows. Her cloistered life was one of quiet listlessness. She sews and cooks with detached exactness, without word or expression. It took all she had to leave her homeland, she came to America drained.
She told Matt the tales of her homeland, folk songs, history, stories of their family left behind. These old stories are the only thing Matt can remember her being passionate about. Her life revolves in endless circles around her lost country. She sees few and only learns the bare minimum of English. Her accent sounds like the low clanging of bells; her voice is copper tarnished with her homeland and sounds strange on the words of the chrome plated country.
Matt is largely left alone and he detests it. The air is heavy with sighs and sorrow, every room is suffocating. He escaped the dark confines of the house as soon as he was old enough.
He was one of the shaggy haired children of a similar type that roved the twilight streets in packs. They are children of parents who are absent even when they are there. They are the products of casual negligence that often just barely bordered legality. Most grow up in broken homes and trespass in abandoned ones. They range in age from lanky, slouching teenagers to little knock kneed siblings that tag along behind like puppies. They are left to their own devices most of the time, the younger ones play with battered toys and the older ones grow marijuana under florescent lights. Matt was one of them to the bone with Salvation Army hoodies and a yard rife in dandelions.
He was an unremarkable student and went to the local community college on a minority scholarship and dropped out the second year, bored with the placidity of the place. He hops on a greyhound bus with a duffle bag of clothes, a little over sixty dollars and no real plans. Matt rides for over 36 hours, stumbling out at grimy stations with numb legs and sore bones. He gets thirty of his sixty dollars stolen outside Indianapolis.
He rides to the nearest big city, New York in his case. He can write well and has just the right amount artistic disinterest that he can land a job at an underground magazine. He meets Marianna there, she was halfway working as a graphic designer. It’s an upper class pet project, not unlike professional fashion or flower arranging, an elegant way to waste time. She’s a terrible worker, laziness is the least of her sins, abject psychosis is her worst.
Marianna lead a cliché of a childhood, she had been born choking on a silver spoon to a family of eastern WASPs. She had been disowned at nineteen for offenses varying from sexual to criminal that had been whisperingly tolerated since she was twelve, but nineteen was the age when you were “old enough to know better.” And so was the end of her days as one of the glitterati. She spits French accented venom with words like nouve riche and nobless oblige and is smugly content with her status as the enfant terrible of the ruling elite.
He moves in with her a few weeks after they first meet her and they consummate the agreement on the editor’s desk.
Even after the gun incident, they go to parties together with young artists and writers that never have jobs and indulge in their sins of choice in trashy apartments. Marianna wore a sundress that didn’t flatter her, pink patterned and fluttering at her ankles.
The house is dark and throbbing with music and the thumping of feet.
“Hey there, sweetheart.” A scummy looking boy with a scraggly beard and wrinkled clothes attaches himself to Marianna like a leach as soon as she steps into the room. He has a rat face and a nose for weakness. She bats her lashes and Matt slips past her, trying his best to avoid involvement in this inevitable mess.
Wallflowers stick to the edges of the rooms with shy eyes and wine glasses. Braver souls wander in small knots of two or three. A small tangle of girls watch him in a coyly predatory fashion, flaunting hips studded with sharp sequins and holding pink painted claws to high cheekbones. They have green shadow around their eyes drawn in graceful slopes and pink lipstick, brighter colorations indicate poison. The men look cowed comparatively, washed out and dulled in old leather and faded jeans, a weaker species.
Matt ignores them all and drifts upstairs. The music and the noise are muffled and he follows the sound of hushed voices to a back bedroom.
He opens the door and there are a small group sitting in a circle. They look up at him, necks craning like birds.
“Hi!” a grungy looking boy is the first to speak. He gives Matt a crooked smile, tangled blonde hair flopping in his face. He’s synthetically friendly and it’s more than liquid courage, his bravery is injectable. Chemicals made to unraveled neurons into something simple and pleasant. Matt smiles back politely and nods, sitting down in the circle. A girl with a flowing mass of curly hair sitting next to him smiles shyly up at him. She has a scatter of freckles going down her slender shoulders and snubbed nose. He had seen her a few times before, a casual acquaintance he hadn’t considered paying much attention to. Her name might be Emily?
She gives him a coy look, quietly seductive. The subtlety of her gaze speaks to an unaffected mind.
“Pick your poison.”  She offers a handful of pills and tabs of paper matter-of-factly.
A dark haired girl puckers black-painted lips his way, giggling and falling into the boy. The rest watch somewhat warily. He opens his mouth, lolling his tongue. The curly haired girl smiles, placing a square of paper decorated with pink printed flowers on his tongue, dispensing a sacrament. She takes her own with a crooked smile and the world is suddenly awash in mercy.
Matt stumbles onto the balcony. The sunset is teetering on the top of the city, the colors calico-ing together into the darkening sky. The paper is still dissolving on his tongue and he can feel the drug slipping slowly into his blood. The sunset is almost more than he can stand. He holds onto the railing, teetering on the platforms of his heavy shoes. His eyes are dilated to pinpricks but there’s a certain clarity in the distortion of his gaze. The drugs take an edge off his cynicism, filling the void of his apathy with synthetic affection.
Any other time he would have scoffed at the silliness of sunsets but he sees it now. A ray of the dying sun breaks through the clouds, the champagne light shining over the rooftops. Through his vices he finds his virtue, the drugs and sex fill up the hollow in his chest where his heart should be. The curly haired girl appears at his side at the same moment that the sky breaks into brightness, a miracle.
She stares out with the same awe, light reflecting in miniature her cornflower eyes. She holds onto his shirt sleeve with absent, grasping fingers, leaning her cheek against his shoulder. They stumble on each other’s arms, laughing to each other at nothing. The inky rooms blur with the colors of women’s dresses and men’s ties, all mixed in the yellow halos of lamplight. She leads him to a darkened room, brass curls bobbing down her shoulders. He kisses her, and she claws clumsily at his shirt buttons. There are copper chains around her neck and bangles jangling on her wrists. They fall onto the bed together, their kaleidoscope eyes full of light.
He wakes up with her pressed to his side, curls flattened against his chest. He pulls a carton of a strangers cigarettes off the bedside table and a lighter. She curls closer to him when he moves, he turns his face away from her, blowing a puff of smoke. She nuzzles her face into his t-shirt in her sleep. Her makeup is smeared, bangles tarnished on her wrists. Her bones stick out at gawky angles in the good light and her freckles are blotchy.
He slips out of her embrace, dressed and hailed a cab on the corner and went home unchanged.