Excerpt from Fishflies: the Men of the Riverhouse

Marream Krollos

Otis, in 214:

I waited for Otis to knock on the door of 716, I knew I would recognize the knock. I stared at the door as if … my heart, my stomach, my limbs were bats sending sonar out the door, into the Riverhouse. When he did not come, I called a friend in Thailand. I cried and cried about how I’m so lonely that I’m waiting for a man with seven to eight baby mamas, and seven to eight children, to knock on my door so we can pretend that his girlfriend knows he’s up here so it’s fine because we are just friends talking in the middle of the night. Then I insulted this friend. Told him I know that he is ashamed of being with women so young. He said, I’m not, I said, You are. Then because we had watched the same movie and somebody had said drank the Kool-Aid, I tried to see if he knew where the expression came from, what were the first suicides it took before language was born. I said, You’ve known me for years, do you really think I’d be friends with a man who isn’t ashamed when he fucks a kid? He let it slide because I had been crying.

I wanted more whiskey, so I asked for a ride from an app. The driver was a Yemeni woman who told me a story about her mother telling everybody in their village that if her daughter wanted to leave Yemen she could do so. And when they said that her daughter would fuck men in her American apartment, being all alone, she said to them, If she wanted that, she would bring them here into my home as well. The logic didn’t make sense to me, but I had been drinking. I asked how her mother could be so brave. She explained that her mother believed religion was inside of you, what you could take in and let out from what it gave you was up to you. I insisted there was more to that type of courage, so she told me her mother and grandmother were … I don’t remember now. But I kept repeating slightly different variations of: this is a story of generations of Yemeni women … This I know I did because I wrote the line down out of shame. I told her I would help her tell her story in writing, the story of five generations of Yemeni women … I walked into the store, City Market, but forgot to buy more whiskey. I instead bought pints of ice cream and a drink for my new friend, because I am Egyptian and she is Yemeni and we knew what that means since she said she’d had Egyptian friends. I came home and realized there was no more alcohol, I forgot to buy alcohol like I left to do, so ate the pints of ice cream and thought of Otis in bed.

Otis, who has a baby mama living downstairs.

Otis kisses me goodbye at the door when he leaves. I reach up, he holds his glass to my lips. I say, More, I need all of it, you go down to be with people, I’m up here alone. He says wide and wild-eyed, You are free. You’re free.

I’m free to actually want him.

If she knew, if she found out, I would just have to slowly explain. I would say, I am so sorry. I have been so sad and touching him makes me happy. I have not had a life where when a man looks at my ugly body and says, I love your body, as if he had been trying to hold it in, but couldn’t any longer … Or a life that would make it so when a man touches my body like he’s trying to grasp on to, spoon up, to kiss scoops of cloud before they disappear in his hands … I have not had the kind of life where if there is a moment of feeling as if my legs aren’t the legs of an ogre, I can just say anything, whatever I want, to someone who says, I will see you again, I will fuck you again, especially when he’s inside of me, cause usually this is when people know they will not see me again, but it is when he insists he will not leave. Please, forgive me. He kisses me like I’m being fed. I feel like a star in the world, and a star in the sky as he keeps kissing me. Your man tastes like ancient rain, only once like milk, once like vegetable soup, but always so quenching. He is strong enough to lift me up, hold onto my hair, and throw me around without pain, by spreading his fingers out across my head at the roots of my hair and bracing my body by using his own. I am not the type of body who has been held, much less lifted, you see …

December 26, 2020:

I’ll never write again, all I’ll ever have to say from now on is that I wake up thinking of hands around my neck squeezing until I can’t breathe, to soothe myself. My hair is cut and dyed, it will only stay good for a week. I filled out the census and had to say I am White again, wrote a little note about how I am not White, and sent it again. I watch Barber Shop 3 over and over again. I masturbate thinking maybe it’s burning calories. I am only worth one ounce of shit, I am not even worth an ounce of shit. My ankles hurt. Sometimes when I’m begging God for something, I beg so hard that I can feel splinters from the bottom of Christ’s cross on my hands and cheeks and chest. I masturbate again, more calories. In my dreams, now, I purposely jump off buildings and out of windows, and I let my throat drop to my gut, I refuse to wake up, I let myself get to the concrete, I practice it, I make sure to stay sleeping, and if I wake up I keep imagining how it would feel anyway.

What did I say wrong yesterday? Everything. I look up, God, should I go to City Market for more alcohol, I write in a Google search. Google comes up with market of God, it’s a sign, so I do. I tell myself that I saved my own self from being in the same room with Otis and believing I love Otis and wanting Otis and maybe fucking Otis. I’m educated, but I only know what the Tulsa riots are because of a television show I watched. I am educated, but have no worth. When I try and sleep sometimes there is a chant in the back of my mind that works its way forward, I love you, I love you, I love you. I am begging it at somebody.

Unless I’m writing, I’m pretending to be somebody else, I am surviving by daydreaming I do not have this body. I’ve opened the door of 716 in the Riverhouse and looked outside to make sure Otis Harris wasn’t there waiting for me to open the door.

I need surgery for many large orange-sized tumors in and around my unused womb. If I have the hysterectomy, I don’t want them to make a small incision. I want them to open me up like I’m a cadaver, clean out all the bad, all the fat around my organs, then wash my organs, stroke my heart, my lungs, my liver, my kidneys, put everything back in the order it was removed.

I fall asleep at night dreaming of Otis Harris. I see him on me, in me, coming inside me, making me useful cause I make him happy for a second, making me pregnant, making something alive in me, making me female, making me human. My kidneys hurt every morning from filtering poison, I want somebody to cut me open, clean it, stroke it. I really want it to snow, but because of climate change, Detroit winters are mild now and there is only ever a mild snowstorm once a month.

I have a dream where a man comes to visit me under a seat in an abandoned movie theater, where I live like a hunched troll. He comes by one night and kisses me, I think he likes me. He will come back every night and kiss me one time, he says, and I am so happy. I drink a pint of whiskey, then a half pint of whiskey, I can’t eat food because I had a fight with Otis. I said, I love you, he said, Thank you. I made a joke very jokingly about how I’m sure there are some people who have said thank you after somebody tells them they love them who don’t go to hell. He said I’m telling him he will go to hell, I try and explain, he wants to leave, I throw my naked body against the door, say, You can’t leave like this, we will never see each other again and you are important to me. He starts to flail around, telling me that I’m just too much, I do too much. Then he says, Ok, fine, you are important too, and leans to kiss me and I say, Fuck you, never see me again, goodbye! So, I drink, but I can’t eat, and I’m really happy that I can’t eat, because there is no food inside of me. So, I do whatever else I want because I trust my body this week, it does not want to eat, so what smart things does it want to do. I listen to LP all night until noon, and I think I’m happy because I still can’t eat. I like my nipples, and they are on my breasts, and my breasts are a part of my whole chest. Later, I still have not slept for days, so I google God, help me, as I cry, to see what he will say. I don’t know if I should go back to City Market for more alcohol. So, I google should I go to City Market. It says market of God. So, I go, thinking I have to say something to the driver to change our lives, that will be the point. We talk about how he is unemployed too, and his family doesn’t understand what it is like, so I repeat over and over, I understand. I come home, I imagine Otis using his hands and mouth on my chest as if he is trying to kiss on clouds that keep disappearing in his hands.

Old, dark, tall man in 712 who shot himself in the head:

What was he thinking about?

A time he got caught cheating, he lifted the smart girl’s paper off the top of the turned-in stack of papers and walked back to his desk, but she got up to change an answer and realized the sheet was missing. Walking back to her desk, she saw her paper on his desk, and her white face turned red. He said, I told you I picked it up by accident. She didn’t believe him, changed her answer and told him he could have the paper back. The first time he realized he’d called himself stupid in front of others, during a presentation in college, where everybody else was White, when he was supposed to pretend he wasn’t, at all costs. Continuing to steal tips from a coffee shop of kind-enough White people, who all already thought he was the one stealing the tips. Maybe realizing he sent a picture of himself to a woman who was just disgusted. Hugging a male friend for too long. Being cruel to a friend, doing the same cruel thing again and again, without being able to stop. Not having a present ready for somebody about to give him one. Going to an ATM with a bank card he stole, and not being able to use it because he was shaking in front of cameras. He said something jokingly about a tattoo he would get of his roommate’s name, Stephanie Forever, he made that bad joke. Insisting that he’d paid back a twenty-dollar bill that he did not pay back, insisting he put it on the desk … making a joke in front of many people, a bad joke about how a man sounded White, in a room full of only White people, and nobody laughed and everybody stared, even though it seemed like that’s what people were talking about. Telling people speaking Korean he knew what they’d said about him, even though he did not. Laughing too hard at his own fart joke at a party. Maybe as he got older he started to dye his hair. The first time he dyed his hair at a salon, he was really sad that day, so took himself out to a bar afterward. Three women who were all lawyers were staring, flirting, he thought. It made him happy, cheered him up. But then, when he saw himself in the bathroom mirror later, he realized they didn’t wash the dye off his forehead, he had had a thick dark inch of dye all around his head.

It got to the point where the minute he woke up he would have to imagine a fist pounding at his chest, breaking through the bone, pounding his heart flat against his spine until it burst and quieted. The sun would be shining through the windows of the Riverhouse, he could only stare at the shapes light could make, but feel nothing. Sometimes he would feel fine. He would think, I will stay alive. Then he would breathe and breathe and feel pain again and eat so slowly because he had nothing else to do and his intestines would cramp and he would sleep and wake up and be unable to bear it without imagining a heavy steel fist pounding away at his chest. He corrected his brother, said this should be then instead of than, and wondered why he would shame anybody without a reason. He insisted on seeing his friend’s pictures of his naked girlfriend, repeating Show me, I’d show you, in mixed company where their discomfort was obvious. I’d show you! He said he needed something, so somebody bought it, then when she did, he got angry at her, he said, I didn’t mean you buy it, I never mean that. Why would you think I meant that, he yelled. I didn’t mean you had to buy it. His friend jokingly told him a story about how Coptic priests pee in water when they are baptizing so that is why Coptic people always smell of it. He wished he could have fought in a war, so he could have died a long time ago. He ran away from bullets, thinking he might survive if he fell to the ground and stayed still, but he did not want to be the only one in the world left alive. He knew if he’d ever felt loved, really loved, he wouldn’t have done most of the things he had done with his life. Die with dignity, don’t want to live so much that you cut up another man’s body in the cold to eat his flesh so you can live. He thought he would make a girl happy when he told her she was beautiful after she said she was not, by telling her they could ask anybody and they would agree. She begged No, don’t please don’t. He seemed about to ask people walking by if she was beautiful. She started crying hysterically. He had to apologize over and over again. Trying to touch her shoulders and wipe her tears away as she looked at him as if he should know what would happen next. He had a crush on a Romanian teacher. Left his history book there every day, so he could go back for it after school, until the teacher just could not hide the frustration on his face, though he wanted to be nice. What if he spontaneously cried once in front of other men, and not a woman who loved him. He wasn’t like clean little boys who change their clothes every day and say things like, My mother will just wash it, when he was asked, What will you do if your shirt gets dirty? He let his mother put him in a suit the first day of sixth grade, a hand-me-down that felt like wearing plastic. He said, I don’t think this is the right thing to wear, I don’t like this pin-striped suit, but his mother insisted that this is what people do the first day of school in America. He was happy she was actually paying attention to him because he had worn the same thing every day over and over again for the whole of the fifth grade, a yellow sweater with Mickey Mouse on it. But everybody looked at him funny, and in his mind they pointed. How could something unintentional still hurt so much, even when somebody was not being cruel to you anymore. Who do you blame? A whole people, a country of people? Later in the year, a disgusting headband sewn together was held up by the teacher and he repeated, Whose is it? Nobody? How did it get here then? Nobody will say who this belongs to? He let his grandmother die alone. He made fun of how his grandfather chewed like a cow. When a teacher in a German class wanted them to practice numbers by creating an imaginary phone number, he thought that it would be funny if his imaginary number were 555-555. He got caught picking his nose and putting it behind a bed. He corrected his cousin’s spelling in an angry letter he wrote, and re-mailed it to him because he was so disgusted when his crippled cousin told him that he’d had a sex dream about him and woke in the dream still imagining him holding their baby. He admitted to having been a shoplifter in a college classroom discussion. He jumped on the bed until he was very old. He threw a pen at a child’s body once, to get his attention, but it hit him in the head and the child started crying thick slow soundless tears. He said while teaching a class that he’s never read a poem with a proper name in it, like Patrick or John, never read one like that. Everybody said they could hear his accent even though he didn’t have one. There was a girl named Catherine he knew a long time ago. She was sad about her thighs, like his they touched, and her shorts would ride up in the middle. She was like he was. Her house was dirty and so were her clothes. Her thighs were large and her shorts wedged up. But she was White and he was not. He could not be White or Black. She said, You laughed at me just like the others. What? We were talking about the mean girls. She started sobbing and walking ahead of him and said, You were laughing too. He said, No, I was smiling nervously maybe, but I wouldn’t laugh, they hate me too. What is the difference between us? There is no difference. Neither one of us is better and this is still upsetting, even more upsetting because there was no reason to laugh or smile. His voice breaking, she cried, and he said, I let them make fun of her, to himself. I was one of them, even though they hate me too. He cried cutting up tomatoes, because his roommate said he was attractive for an Egyptian, once you find out he’s just Egyptian, he’s not bad. And his friend didn’t know why he was crying. Once, he was so sad that a White man pretended to not have received an email in which he told him he loved him, he was standing over a glass pan out of the oven once, it hit water in the sink and exploded everywhere but missed his face, and he thought he wished it could have taken out his eyes or hit the veins of his neck. His grandfather was in a room praying in Arabic and Coptic, swaying and counting, every night. His grandmother and mother and brother in another tiny room watching television on the floor. He once asked a man to hit on his friend because she’d just found out that her boyfriend … and the man got insulted and he didn’t know why. His uncle was always outside in their yard arranging the garbage he’d collected from other garbage cans that day. He is pacing to music back and forth outside while pretending to be somebody other than himself, in a different body. A priest tells a story about how a man asked God to save his daughter by bringing her back to life, and so God does, and then she becomes a prostitute, and the man wishes that he’d let God take his daughter in the first place. He listened to this knowing he was a whore too. A priest tells a metaphor about how a man used a tissue and then offered it to another man, as sanitary and desirable as a woman who has been used. The priest picks up a tissue and blows his nose in it, and then asks, Would you want it. He listened to this, knowing he would not be a whore. He loved kissing Coptic priests’ hands, couldn’t wait after church to hold their hands and grab them, bow down, and press clearly with his lips. Press his lips against skin and hair of a man’s hands, and it was the right thing to do, this touch was good, it was God-approved. His favorite thing still is to kiss, but there is nobody he would like to kiss except Otis Harris. Coptic girls all straightened their hair and he didn’t and nobody at church liked him and nobody at school because he was not Black or White or Mexican or acted like he was a Coptic girl. Everybody psychic he has been to has told him he will never have a man, never have love, never be in love. One even told him that he is a dark cloud. He fasted for his cousin for months so his cousin could walk and his cousin didn’t walk, and later he humiliated that cousin by resending his angry letter back to him with corrections. He screamed for his grandmother and cried with her so God would heal her because she was crying and screaming in the middle of the night in a tiny house wanting everybody to wake up with her, but only he would. He put his mouth on a man’s uncircumcised penis and it had not been washed for so long, as if the skin had never been pulled up, and he still wanted to please because he knew this man did not love him. He told a doctor what had happened to him as a child with his father and uncles, because on television they said this is what he should do, but the doctor told him that he was not the person to speak to. It got to the point where every night he snuck into his bed as if he were in danger, and the covers would hide him. Then he thought about telling Katie Carey that he had muscular dystrophy to get attention and love. And once he gasped for air, squawked while running up a hill next to girls who actually looked like they ran up hills. He can’t say who his first kiss was because it could have been his sleeping cousin, or his uncle or father. He kept forgetting his keys in his car so a boy from class he didn’t even have a crush on could help him unlock it, days and days in a row. Oh, and telling a doctor something because on a commercial it said to tell somebody, and telling students he’d never read a poem with a proper name, and trying to talk about incest in a foreign language and ending up saying that 30 percent of daughters sleep with their fathers and being laughed at … He told Robert, the Riverhouse security guard, that he was masturbating, waiting for him, but Robert was never going to come over that night because Robert thought he was scary. Where are you? Can I just lie in bed thinking about you until you get here? Robert once said, Let me know how good it is, Baby. And he said, It’s so good it makes up for everything that’s ever happened to me. It makes everything worth it if you are inside me right now. He smeared tubes of lipstick on mirrors while he was dancing alone in a bathroom both arms and legs outstretched.

Maybe he told his mother she’s too stupid to love. Maybe his mother told him he makes her wish she were dead. Maybe he chanted I’m a pig on top of people’s coats when at a party where he felt so ugly that he had to go back into his room, where the coats were, and throw them out on the ground and scream hysterically, I am a pig. Maybe he was sometimes startled by sounds that came from outside his door, but sometimes comforted, sometimes it was the only comfort he had. Maybe he was asked to stop jumping on his bed in college. He once wondered out loud about whether people deserve to die of disease if they had sex …

January 17, 2021:

I fuck men who don’t love me, don’t know me, don’t want me, over and over again, as if I keep listening to a song that was playing when somebody spat on me, hoping the next time I listen something good would happen. If you listen to a song long enough, different things will happen to you during it. People keep turning from butterflies into caterpillars right before my eyes as if I am the jar that makes wings fall off. I clean my body as if I’m taking care of an elderly lady who soils herself, needs her armpits wiped, sweats at night. A serial killer would know how to press into my flesh until he punctured something, have the strength physically mentally emotionally. It won’t snow in Detroit because the world is ending. I’ve been dreaming of a world where one snowstorm traps everybody in the same place for days and days, and what if it happened when Otis was here with me, but then I remember that even if there is a snowstorm outside the Riverhouse, he could walk down the stairs inside the Riverhouse, and be home.