Novella about a teenage girl's coming of age. A tale of friendship, alienation, and body image
The cop fired a warning shot
that blew her off the float.
by Gregg G. Brown
published by BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
It was always a challenge, pretty much, to extricate ourselves from New York without too much bloodshed.
The train from Penn Station roared out of its lion's throat of darkness, squealing to a queasy halt at some crappy, dank platform in the Village. Florescent light dripped from the tile stairwell, each tile yellow as an old tooth. The breath of the night, which should have been a cool, strengthening flair of clean air, instead rolled heavily down the stairs, flooding my tired senses with a green, wretched stench.
My skin felt trapped by the dampness, as if I had just entered a ruined hothouse.
"Jesus, its cold."
I could hear my friend, Gary, standing on the lobed edge of my ear, shouting down a long, windless tunnel. His face was suddenly at my shoulder and had a bitter look, as if he were being forced to swallow a sour lump of aspic jelly.
He looked at me as though I had put my face on upside-down or something. I tried to smile.
"Yeah, well. What do you expect?"
I felt an indifferent pressure at my back hurrying me in the proper direction, out of the main flow of the crowd and toward our selected exit. Just before we got to the grim, cathedral-like opening that dumped us from the cave full of snakes (which was the subway) and onto the street, we had to come to an abrupt halt before a large, very still, eyeful of water. You could tell that nobody had stepped in it for some time because all the dirt had separated into finely grained hills and valleys and because the water was very clear-- as if a sheet of museum glass from a display had been carefully lowered into place and invisibly welded and sealed there by a blowtorch. It seemed to me a little bit like when you're in school, and the teacher points you out to the others to answer a question, or as an especially good example of something, even as a good example of a bad student.
Before I could kneel down and get a good look at the puddle, just as I was squinting in a half-crouch and made out what I thought was a blue, cancelled, triangular Bavarian stamp squinting back at me, a pallid, hurried hand grabbed my elbow and had me leaping over the puddle and into the street as though my entire body were composed of water. In a few more instants, we had left all the blue, troubled bodies that had packed the station behind us. We trudged along the dim sidestreet in a molten silence.
We shot through the pierced side of the building and into a packed alley churning with citizens, each of whom had-- apparently-- had his tongue surgically removed and a grimace installed.
I looked at my friend.
He looked washed out in the bad light.
And somehow, blended in the motley mound of the crowd, I got pulled apart from my friends--- heads moving among heads. I felt the pressure of a stench climbing down my throat and bent down against it.
When I looked up again, the night and swirled my world away.
No sooner had I become separated from my friends, unplugged from their continuous, little zingers and electric comments, than I found myself completely lost. I wandered at the trailless, industrial edge of the city, staggering from towering dark to towering dark and immediate puddle to unexpected ditch.
I looked around. The moon glinted from fences in patches, obscuring the real distances of objects; I crouched through a resilient tear in one vinyl-coated chainlink to my left, letting my foot slide a bit on the downward gravel while I held on to the ripped fence to keep myself from going too far too fast.
I found myself in an extended, carved ditch running through the center of which were an elevated set of train tracks. They glimmered coldly a few feet in front of me. I heard voices coming around a bend in the track, high and lulling as if drunken, and scrambled to get over the tracks, gripping the steel rails strongly for a second, and shifted into the protective darkness of some bushes on the distant side.
Two men shuffled into sight.
They were moving down the tracks and talking quietly, intent on some aesthetic difficulty or current political knot that seemed to require a great deal of laborious elaboration; their attention was entirely on the fine, verbal constructions they were proposing and vetoing as they paced along the rail-ties in my direction.
They were almost level with my thin, moony bush when they heard the train coming.
The shorter of the two skated along the steel rail for a moment in the direction of the impending train, a gaseous harraumph still invisible from their perch. The taller one followed suit, sliding with a lazy ease down the tracks.
They executed a pair of agile minuets for the moon.
Eventually, a dim pewter glow began to lance down the tracks behind them. As it edged up to their heels, the shorter of the two men hopped nimbly from his track.
But the other refused to dismount.
The man at the side of the tracks was swearing and throwing hammering curses to have his friend come down from the slight elevation. He made rapid, pulling gestures with his hands, his thrust-out face twisted with an unbelievable anxiety as he continued to make coarse, inaudible shouts.
His friend's body was limned in an immaculate, white light, as a stick before being thrown into a fire. His outlined physique was a splendid black that obscured all expression in his face, but the body itself, long and unearthly, with arms up and legs splayed in a tumbling gait, had gained such a powerful ability of expression that no more auger of his complete despair was needed than to watch its antic dance before the onrushing flood of the train's raillight.
The train screamed inches in front of me, shaking the hidden bush. The black air whistled. When the train had passed, everything was darkness. I squinted into it.
The tall fellow was there, sucking some blood from a cut in his finger with a medicinal carefulness, as if he were applying a prescription to his lips,-- his face slightly soured, but dutiful and patient withal,-- as he glanced up at his companion from his position among the loose stones.
The train receded.
"Geez, you'd think that guy would've slowed down or something. You'd think he would've tooted his damn horn or whatnot. I mean-- what's more important, his damn schedule-- or what?"
His companion, shorter, redfaced, told him to go to fucking hell. Crazy selfabsorbed bastard. And then they proceeded eastwards together towards midnight.
I thought myself to be strangely lucky to be a silent witness, crouching behind my itchy bush, to two such serious, absurd souls. They had come as fiercely and oddly as bats into firelight, full of leathery flapping and high-pitched squeals, only to disappear again as suddenly as yanked kites.
From my cold quarters behind the slimy laurel, I wondered what else would fly out and appear to me in the dark.
Out of nowhere, I saw this girl worming her way towards me down the street, her alert hips alive in the neutral night.
"Hey, Carrie!"
Veronica! Fuck!
"That band was so drab."
She pulled my arm taut, negotiating my body from its lazy haze.
"All the Nirvana addicts were slam-dancing to a record.... So lame."
She slid out a bottle nestled in her purse and took a swig. She handed it over to me in the heat.
The streetlights stood out against the dark like pink sentinels. They rolled past. I let go of my dream of the train and those men in the lank light.
Then we turned into a so--- so empty novelty store.
Veronica pulled a rubber chicken from its neatly noosed spot on a wire rack.
Its weak beak and wrinkled crest were printed an unblinking red, like a hooker's lips. She spun the hollow body like a propeller from the neck, the gawking rubber skull almost completely hidden in her fist.
"Shake and fake."
She swung her hips lazily and tried to nick me with the spinning chicken's splayed toenails. My body took a rapid step backwards. I couldn't help the smile.
"Fuck you."
I paused a moment, my hands expanding innocently in empty gestures. Guiltless, white. Then I made a grab for her elbows.
She screamed and giggled. She scriggled.
"Oh no, no. Don't, don't do that."
I found a turning bone and closed on it.
"Oh. Ow. Hey, hahaha--- you."
I found the nerve that lurked in the churning juncture between her wrist and shoulder and gave it a nuzzling squeeze.
"Ah-ha, ah-ha. Ahhh...."
She fell on the floor laughing, her collapsed weight swaying on her obliquely oriented ankles. But God, was she angry. A riled pile of cute. Breathing through constant smiles in her paisley dress.
We got into a big argument and an ugly fight.
I eventually wrested the chicken from her grasp, and she eventually induced a bruise to appear on my thigh. In our struggle we (or, more correctly, her retreating back) knocked over a jittery rack of sex trinkets, silver phalluses, copper tits, etc; trinkets the size of a bracelet-ornament: pinky handcuffs, miniature flaying devices, that sort of thing.
After Veronica had pulled her dress straight, and I had rolled down the side of my pants twice to watch my grape bruise appear (spectacularly large for the small amount of hurt that caused it)--- we left the gag shop.
We had failed to rifle through the brown ersatz photostat postcards designed to appeal to us the young, or to murmur about the casual poses our literary gods had been caught in, pants wrapped around ankles, wrenched faces, little Lucia Joyce inserting a swizzle-stick up Papa's blinded, bilged nose. Nor did we buzz about our favorite CDs--- the new, sweet song by this one or that one. What we had done was make a mess, and of that we did a very fine job. We could hold our wounded heads up, in certain crowds.
We were left to continue our tussle in the streets.
Veronica was leading the way to the traffic light, swishing her prim, laughing ass in front of me. I looked her up and down. The paisleys complemented her swirled shape, the lank black hair, the sexy angle of her arms, her carnal jaw.
I felt suddenly that God should have punished her long ago.
Made her cross-eyed or something. Anything.
While I was thinking about Veronica's disposition on judgement day, I felt my lazy arm being taken over by a powerful force, like catching a line drive when you're looking the other way, chatting with the shortstop about the ickiness of microorganisms, say, or boys who wore hair gel.
My arm was levitating, like when you hold one arm down with your left hand while trying to lift it with all of your might and then release it and cease trying to lift it all at once, only to find the pinned arm rising ineluctably of its own volition.
That's how it was. There was the ghost of a line drive levitating my arm without my permission. The arm rose, floated into Veronica's hair and-- once there-- wrapped a length of its solemn blackness between forefinger and thumb, placed a pulley weight of the rest of her hair in my palm, curled fingers around the mass ---and yanked.
We stepped into this little out of the way Italian calorie shop, Prima Vero, to get bread to soak up some of the vodka that was wringing our stomachs. Jackie and Matt sat perched in the misty glass. Gary was a shadow in the leaning rear of the store. As soon as I went in, I knew something was wrong.
The smell nearly killed me.
It was gorgeous; lamb sausages, arrant spices of Sicily; squared mason jars filled with red flakes that smelled like the devil's mustache, racks of lobed cheeses ranging from an angry orange on the far left to a lovely butter color by Veronica's knee as she leaned against the glass to catch her breath.
"Mmmm. I feel like I've just died and curled up in God's nose. This stuff smells so good you probably wouldn't even mind vomiting it up just to get another whiff."
She couldn't help laughing at herself as we began to squint around for the breads.
"Starch ahoy," cried Veronica as she veered towards the aquarium glass of a counter in the corner.
She skidded to a confused stop, swaying slightly before the huge warm loaves of bread that occupied the counter in front of her.
"Mmmm."
Veronica stared at the tan landscape before her, confronted with the sheer goodness of food. Her eyes got a bit glazy until Cherry Cherry came running up behind her and slapped her back.
"Hey, what're you guys doing?"
Veronica blinked.
"Scouting for carbohydrates."
...
They did not sit down to their meal of bread and seltzer.
They stood outside the thin, opaque glass of Prima Vero and munched mundanely on the warm, rich loaves--- peeling back their paper skins as they progressed in their meal.
Each leaned laconically against the glass, burping and giggling, staring at the hypnotic commotion of the traffic and unable to see the summer sky when they glanced up because of the halo effect of the streetlamps. Light simply frayed into a dim ceiling in the thick humidity, the oppressiveness of which was lessened by a constant and mysterious, ductile stream of cool air moving somehow among us.
Every time I looked down at my long loaf of bread, I could feel my stomach respond hatefully, loathing any intelligence that had the bad taste to confront it with any sort of variegated stimuli at this hour other than sleep. It held its liquid fist of lava against my throat, and I looked back up at the dull nothingness between the frayed lights that surrounded me.
After eating, we picked up the heavy train and floated back to the burbs.
Gary wound up dragging me home to my apartment when we arrived.
I must have been too far gone to hear the door knock.
Gary was hoved up to the heater like a mustard plaster somewhere to my left and just beyond the cloudy tentacle of my consciousness, like a heavy angel. We had gone to sleep talking the night before on the mattress shoved into the hottest corner of my rented studio that served as my bed, and the main arena of my consciousness in general.
I heard a weighted footstep or two, a ryhthmless pogostick, approach the bed.
Everything was so detached in the measureless diffuse light that sifted into the room through the pinned sheet over the window that I didn't pay any attention to the sound. The unidentified foot floated nearer between dreamy pauses.
I heard a wrapped newspaper hit the only real chair in the room, an overstuffed armchair that flared out at the top like a lily. I opened my eyes.
I lolled at the weak edge of the mattress--- which, since it lay directly on the hardwood floor, always made me feel as if I were sleeping on a giant, black stretch of weatherstripping.
I stared into the pleasant fog, waiting for an identity to resolve itself from the whiteness.
A face appeared.
Carlos. I felt a slow, leaky warmth drain into my empty limbs. Finger by finger the warmth filled my arms, surged past elbows up to my shoulders, coursed hugely from my loggy knees to my turned hips, waited on the brink of the four gates of my torso for a moment and then rushed in-- heated and liquid-- in a black surge, crashing with an awful darkness into the center of my chest.
"Hey," I said.
I was so glad to see him there, near me. I swear I could almost hear the sound of his heart, thrubbing its gorgeous rounds, under the tan-and-beige sweater he had on. He smiled.
Carlos was this older man I had been seeing, off and on, for about six months until, gradually, like sands in the hourglass, or thumbs in the dike, I couldn't hear myself think when I found myself in the same room with him. He had the loquacious eyes and self-interrupting tongue of a South American, tripling his Rs and erasing his Hs in flawless repetition.
Carlos fixed his attention on something in the air slightly over my shoulder and to my left, the way practicing hunters must stare at some stark portion of the sky, shotguns half pulled up to their splayed waists, pointing blankly, before they shout 'Pull!'
Then his face collapsed.
It returned to the natural, slack expressionlessness face of the dead--- which all share one face anyway--- or a sleeping infant too young for dreams.
Carlos stepped backwards as if removing his loafers from wet cement. That slow, cowed motion. He was in reverse all the way back to the top of the steps and then stopped. I was calling to him to stop from the mattress, but when I heard him heading down the top step, I panicked.
I heaved myself off of the bed. My body was formless, as in a dream, and there was this lead cannonball I had to carry along with me between my knees. I ran as best as I could.
"Carlos, it's not what you think. Not at all.... "
I cornered him in the stairwell.
"Carlos, don't be a jerk. Come back upstairs."
His large, calflike eyes turned to the wall.
"No... no."
He shuddered out of my grip like a suffocating fish.
"But it's not what you think...."
Before I knew it, I was bouncing after him into the apartment parkinglot. Miniature trees shivvered darkly between distant brick structures. The asphalt, mixed with insistent grains of sand, stung my naked feet.
"Carlos!"
He folded into his car; grunting, adder-eyed.
I fell into a cold hell of mixed emotions.
So much of me loved him! I tried to tally up the various vectors of my body and mind this desire had infected and made swell. A stung tongue, an inflated foot. An infected eye, a rubella-thick heart. Various rashes.
My entire body was like a bone pudding around this guy. I didn't know what to do. A terrible hilarity began to rip through me, unfurling my psyche in an arctic jet wind.
My tongue clung to his. My aching limbs jangled after him like tin cans strung behind a wedding car. This was crazy. Was this the abject dependency of a patient on her psychoanalyst? Or was it merely an electric thrill I was unwilling to go without? A jolly jolt. Something suave for my overtaxed capacitor.
I had to follow him.
I headed back to my apartment; the dramatic entrance was still peeling glittering flakes of blase paint. My hole in the wall, the smoldering door. Had I heard a chorus of strangers' faces press against the grubby windows staring down? A thousand noses squeaking to see my miniseries moment, absent now that the unending commercial of daily living had started up again. Channel hoppers. The door clapped shut behind me, veiling my fury, curtaining my apathy. Dramatic applause. Melodramatic pause.
Gathering up my personalities like an incipient Sibyl, I trooped up the steps.
I turned around, steadying myself on the silver tongue of the ironing board.
And there was Gary, standing in my shorts, his big hands hanging uselessly at his sides, his face blank.
I couldn't believe he was still here.
Just what the hell had he done? I must have asked him, but the answer was inconsequential as he began to describe to me what he had been doing while I was still worming my way out of a nice, comfortable coma.
"All I did was wave to the guy and then shook my head after indicating you. You know, trying to emphatically disconnect us in any way. I waved like this, and then shook my head. That's it. I think you should have all the data you can when you approach something like this."
He shook his head again, mouthing a loud no in silence and then stopped. I waited for the next thing to happen, looking away slightly until I could see a few toes of some pretty girl's foot.
Gary twitched. A supercilious grin licked across his face.
The bastard. What had I ever let him come over here for? Because he had given me a late ride home from the city? It seemed like pretty thin reasoning to let somebody sleep with you because of that, or share your mattress even. Even if it only was a piece of crummy foam rubber.
He was gone in a few minutes.
The Parkway was a real bitch.
I felt like I had swallowed sa partially melted plastic doll. Rare nerves had come alive in dark, electric spokes of awareness radiating flashingly from my stomach. The road hummed.
I held onto the wheel as if it were the last solid object I would touch for months.
Down the flashing road, coiling and uncoiling blackly beneath me--- at the intercestices of an interstate--- a folded car fumed and hummed, releasing bludgeoned plumes of tarry smoke from its engine's still fiery innards. Had it been a banana yellow VW? I don't know, but there it lay, curled under its umber umbrella, trying to return to its pale and tanless, triumphal and functioning hue.
I slowed to an observant crawl.
There was definitely something yellow there, turning itself into black air.
The chemical flames played with fractured images of themselves in the dead headlights. Mirrory, alive.
And there, by this wrecked car, like two cops, were this girl and boy, kissing. Legs interleaved, chins unhinged, etc. The Whole Bit.
A rebounded shout doubled and muffled itself against my shut windows. I leaned over to roll the right one down and got a hot breath of scalding air in my lungs.
"Fucking rubbernecker."
I guess it was the cop who had spoken. Shooting off his mouth.
I watched the couple twinge more tightly together.
It wasn't rubbernecking, really. I wasn't rubbernecking.
How could you call being concerned for someone's soul rubbernecking? When I was a kid and everything I had this fascination for watching amoebas dividing. Now I get off watching people merge. One stern, hopeless face melting into the next. It's the same process as amoebas, really, only in reverse. A return to the womb. All that psychological stuff. Osmosis for the lonelies Cherry called it once, making a little 'Mmmm' sound and smiling.
I don't know what it was with me, but it always seemed more like driving spikes or something than passive osmosis, that sullen sighing of water and oil. These two really complex masses of bones and muscles just grinding and unwinding, grinding and unwinding like a heavy drum of cable. The kerosine smell of a flayed open lobster, the ruined sheets, the whole rubbery mechanism seemed relentlessly flawed.
I drove faster.
A great weariness was awash in me. My adrenaline fever abated in favor of a nap.
I turned off the Parkway and pulled into dew.
I didn't think that I'd ever catch up with Carlos now. Let alone unnerstan' wha' he waz seyin'. I had about as much chance for happiness at this point as Lucy Ricardo.
My head kicked back like a Pez dispenser on its insulated headrest, and I slept.
I dreamed of a ruby matador trying to die.
His ruby cape licked at the dust.
The aroused crowd roared.
He stepped lightly into the ring, small and pure as a pin,
The compressed weight of an ebony bull passed inches from his ribs, which swam under his glittery vest like fish, itching and nipping at his frittery heart. The daylit arena was huge, cavernous.
I was too excited to eat, watching ravenously from the shadowed half of the arena. The entire arena itself must have looked something like an eye from, outer space, its lidless rim aching for some star to jump out of its stellar socket or burst into flames. The raging bull played the concentrated pupil in this eye, running its black, unpredictable circuit within the wildly irised cape of the ruby matador.
Then the dream faded.
I woke up staring at the ceiling I had fallen asleep staring at.
Brevity is the soul of wit, and wheat is the prime ingredient of bread.
That's about all I really know. So, if you want to take advice from somebody or get the "point" of a story you'd better turn these pages to the last one right now and then throw this book out the window.
And that's about all I knew, too, when Veronica and Jackie showed up again,waking me from three days of zoned nightmare to a dry mouth. I must've made it back to my bed, I thought, my plush lush tomb-box, because there they were, adjusting the contents of their bright purses as they walked through the door. You'd think they were making sure that the gun was under the mascara case or something.
Veronica levelled her dead blank stare at me and smiled.
"Wow, you look like somebody hit you in the face with a shovel."
"Road kill," Jackie confirmed, raising an eyebrow.
"Gee, thanks."
"Well, really, why don't you take these and get to work in the bathroom?" Veronica said, dumping a double handful of clacking cosmetics into my arms and then turning me about face with a little, snub-nosed shove in the small of my back to start me tottering off in the direction of the bathroom.
"What, no blindfold?" Jackie faked a look of concern and then laughed. "Jesus, Carrie, you look as grim as Ann Boelyn."
I dumped the makeup into the sink with a cold crash and kicked the door shut.
The mirror opened up before me like a lake of stilled mercury.
It was as if I was looking at myself in the flat blade of a dinner knife. Serving for one, please. Hold the mayo, hold the trophies. Would you like a petrified dish of ego with that Miss? Yes, please, something small though, like that blue and white sugar dish Mrs. Gonzala used last Thanksgiving. The one with the tiny chinese man bent over an enormous fish. The dashed water on the sugardish was so real you could almost see yourself drowning between the blue fluid strokes.
I sized up my various pluses and minuses.
Plus... I stared at the face that floated before me. Perhaps it most resembled the impression a stranger's face might make on an exploded airbag after a fatal crash. That bloated feeling, the displaced eyes, the smeared nose, the tease of possible recognition. A clownish floppiness to all the usual landmarks.
Plus... Well, maybe it would be better to get the minuses out of the way first. That way, I thought, I could leave myself with an overall positive feeling once the dissection was finished. Certainly, that is much more sensible.
Minus:.... Well, minus, minus, minus.
God, my body is so strange. Its as if God had endowed and embowered me with a quisiognomy instead of a physiognomy. From the pale, palpitating breasts down to the shrewd, oniony toes, one lean mass of gangling scribbles and ludicrous ruts. Nipples leaning from their pudding turrets over a landscape of tapioca, aureoles clotted as if in blood homage to inflicted defeats, dimples entrenched as the Khyber pass, belly-button sinkhole slithering its ice-cold tongue into a diseased and farting nexus of snakes that manure fruits back to their gummed beginnings at the whipped behest of overseer enzymes and starving cells, my rotted and collapsing skull anchored in Lapland, my feet unravelling their fennish stench in the paradise breeze of Tahiti, my elbow in the eye of an innocent hurricane lifting its wet skirts over an Indian prairie, my fat fist hissing in the blue abyss of the choked Atlantic shoreline, my blank back snapped by the wizened Himalayas, my scabby legs inflicted by the world's fleas, my ass I know not where.
I gave my lauded nudity a long, sloping look.
What did Carlos see from behind that lion's grin? What did he feel when he became an urgent minnow among my swells? I wondered and puzzled, drugged. Nothing spectacular happened to the fish-shape staring back at me as I dredged for its marvels, sank after its sweet miracle.
It all seemed a bit much. I mean, basically, looking hard at what the mirror had vomited up, like a scolded dog that owns only its own stool and drool, I saw a sort of self-collapsing, self-erecting clothes-hanger inundated with globs of pink flesh, too heavy for the thin industrial high-wire to hold up with any more than a slight human resemblance.
I stared at the girl's face as if from out of the bottom of a well. The small, silver ghost of a face made its elf motions and grimaces deep in an earth my feet floated upon. I stared and stared at the elf's face.
Her silver face fell apart.
The mirror breaks and falls. Somebody's spinning the dewy essences. A malicious finger or faded hand lets the dull skull smash in whispers and disappear, a roman candle with a tongue. A tongue to scream"Jesus" or "Hallelujah!" with, or simply explode and disappear in its ripped glitters, the packed powders burned down to their last green puff of light.
Look at the shrinking face, its lost cavernous eyes looking for a cavern to answer them, some dark, talkative hole. It's as if we were at the bottom of the well together; myself and the wanting elf face, squared off against damp rocks, staring into approximately the correct portions of the evening underground, floating on the hollow melodious moans and utterances that pass for talk between ghouls, comparing our ditched fates, exchanging recipes and hairstyle tips.
Standing with my depleted hips against the white sink, I stared into the dodging face in front of me, its missing cheek, its lapidary eye, its returned stone stare. A thick crack runs like a drop of sweat down its expressionless forehead, past nostrils, and over its amazed smile. The face has just witnessed a bleak killing and escaped. That sort of plaster-on smile, polished unbearable grin.
Veronica and Jackie were probably still out there, waiting for me to whip something together from the stale jigsaw pieces handed to me. What could I assemble from my jags and sags? Maybe if I poured out the creamora of everything human and dull in me there would be something worthwhile left, a shiny smiley face at the bottom of the bowl.
I thought of Veronica snapping out the snarls in my sofa-bed, Jackie straightening the dishes in my sink.
I filled my world with steam and began to scrub.
The sink clears its throat, and I lower my head to the indecipherable steam that yawns from its porcelain basin.
The heat is clear and unbearable. I am able to breathe again for a little while as the blood melts from my nose in numb rivulets. I dab the undefined area with a nimble tissue. The twinned drippings spurt and cease like fangs. My laved and bathed head slowly reattaches its heavy weight of wet hair to an improvised neck as the pooled middle of my newfound face starts to throb. The beat is repetitive and excessive and more than mildly disturbing.
When I had finished with this deep-cleaning process, a bald, bleeding beet squinted in the mirror, a pair of black hatpins sunk into its rosy cueball for eyes. I felt as if I were about to melt. What was stopping me? Sheer inertia, I suppose. I looked at the scramble of colors Veronica and Jackie had handed to me, now half submerged in the sucking whirl of the sink. Most of them had leaked or bled; a swirled palette stared up at me from the sink, like the dazzled eye on a peacock's tail. or the centrifugal patterns imposed on blank cardboard by splats of ketchup and mustard paints in one of those whirligig machines some starry-eyed burnout from the fugitive sixties always drags to the town fair. I fished out an eyeliner from the center of the storm and leaned forward on my elbows to see what would happen next.
I tried to carve a Nefertiti into the porus beet's core, but only managed a clumsy, cloven-faced George Eliot. I sighed at the black scratches I had inflicted on the beet, the burning cheeks I had lit. I sighed. The beet sighed.
I crooked my finger like a fishhook and inserted the cool tube of a tampon. It nuzzled there in white expectation of the first lean bloods of my period.
Reaching with an absent hand, I disrobed a tin hanger and sent it spinning around the pole for the shower curtain. A second dress fluttered back a bit, unsure of where my claw would fall next. She squeaked backwards into a jury of her peers, which I had optimistically arranged in ascending shades and hem lengths. Some small, infant, dying part of me wanted to ram through that rainbow arrangement and come falling out on the other side in a color-coordinated version of the Land of Oz.
I shifted into the dress and ticked the locked door open, stepping through.
Oh, man. I couldn't believe it.
Late for my fucking period, my blood dot. Had the last batch of little crimpings and abdominal punches drained me completely? I bit my fat lip and watched the plush blood collect in the mirror like dew on a fresh corpse. Like Juliet's breath, faintly alive, and too dry to leave a stain on the blameless glass. I studied the pulsed empurpling of my mouth; it felt heavy on my lips, like a warm kiss; like too much greasy lipstick. I wanted to wipe it away, looking in the mirror at the expressionless face I found staring steadily back.
I wanted to wipe away the whole bloody mess. But something stopped me, something the deep ruby, tinged in black, that welled to the edge of my lip with a curious ferocity, tentatively expanding against the unexpectedly chill air, ruby and black and hesitant as an expulsed slug.
I just kept bleeding until it had stained my chin like a chinstrap and continued to pour out of my mouth in a steady throb. I was full of bloods.
Well, at least I wasn't on empty. Yet.
I knew that I'd better check to see if that Latin bastard had drilled me full of kids. Beautiful darkheaded children with dear blue eyes like mine rolling tan on the sandy Costa Rican shore. I wiped my scalded face with an indistinct hand and made a beeline for the pharmacy.
At the mirrory counter I pointed out the one I wanted. ESP.
I looked at the girl on the other side of the counter. Cleanfaced, almost smiling. The girl, about my age,-- no doubt raised in a sane family with a good side job and attending school reasonably well with a boy her own age to fumble around in the dark with. I knew that I should feel as though I'd done something wrong, or left something undone, to have been squeezed out of a bright, happy life like her's--- that I'd grown up on the wrong side of the counter. But I didn't. I felt woodenly buoyant, as though there were the flexible pressure of something inescapable being held down within me; something that eventually just had to rise to its own level where the sea meets the atmosphere; just had to rise and rise, eventually.
Carlos.
I couldn't even bear to think of his name. Scar-los was more like it. Injurious prick. Scabbing my tri-cornered uterus with his acid sperm. What dragon's right did he have to enchain me back to my femininity, staple down my identity with kids? By what slithery injection had I been pacified and made to breed? Wasn't it our androgenous souls that swelled an commingled during sex? What sweated in the bed? A deep silver shiver rivered through me.
I hung my head, took my medicine, and waved goodbye to the staring girl, who waved to me.
Now, where could I go hunch and piss and discover my future? I stared down the empty paving.
Nearby was the rank crudescence of a Public Restroom, warm with flies. Surrounding this fecund hub was the desolation of a strip mall, the crater's weary edge. I spotted, among over-exposed highlights, the neon beacon of DJs jade surf shop adjacent to The Pizza Factory. Gary worked there. I headed for its glimmering, gem-green windows and hovering styrofoam surfboard carved for a cloud-scudding giant, and pinned like a dead lizard to the tar roof of the shop.
My steps were small.
I scurried about the rim, keeping off of the scalding asphalt, which wrinkled my view into the depleted strata of things. I avoided a roaring dog. Its complaisant owner followed slowly behind, attached by a five feet of red wire to the angry apparition, smiling blithely, a lady.
The air was lambent on this the dark side of the street. I watched cars moan and circle, depositing shoppers like so many damned souls to their purgatorial round among manikins posed in the racked gestures of punished sinners. The beetle-wings of the cars would split apart and people would step back among the fuming innards to the next level of the inferno, all with the same stylized expressions on their faces, the same dazed and amazed blanks.
Before I knew it, lost among the lingam and yoni of my blazing contemplations, I had loitered to the entrance of the surf shop.
I ducked through the soldiered doorway with the penitent bent of a nun-crone, whispering to heaven to apply its lightning now and save me the embarrassment of having to use the tube and gadgets tucked in my ESP test.
There were plenty of surfboards; arched on their tails, swooping from strings, planted in racks, lying jumbled in a brown box marked Trade-Ins. I faced a soldier's gallery of them, striped with heraldic gashes of New Guinea tribesmen, fat at their bases, swelling in their hand-tooled centers, shining along their whole length to the polished tips where only daring men hung themselves, extended beyond the waves' thrust.
I nudged between a yellow and blue pair of them capped with crimson tips, and angled towards a glowing knot of young men in neon-camouflage shorts and florid shirts, hunched over and touching with reverent hands the black, ebonite Wave Tamer 60,000. Gary was there, clicking his thumb on the pink fin, interrupting the boys' smooth talk with a labored sales pitch.
"I would like to ride one of these."
"Never, never."
"What do you mean never? Just out on the curls... Yeah, I could handle it."
"Never. No way could you ever afford one of these."
"Man, I don't know about you sometimes, Luce."
"Just sixty-eight dollars a month on a five year plan with a negligible inflation-adjusted interest rate. Nothing more powerful for the price. Imbedded neophyte fibers give instant grab-feel communication of wave tension, water depth, and height of curl. A buried swing-weight located along the gravitational axis...."
Gary had waved to me as I emerged from between the blue and yellow boards at the front of the store, lifting a chalky hand, and by now I was within the body aura of the boys who were impatiently listening to Gary's BS and giving furtive strokes to the black surfboard when he paused to breathe.
I decided to interrupt him.
"Uh, Gary...?" I gave him a blistering smile. One of the young men cocked his head back to glance at me.
"Yes?"
He gave me a trapped look.
"Um..." I paused. "Ah. Is it OK if I, ah, you know, use the bathroom?" I tried to ignore the craned eyes of the boys.
Gary glanced around to make sure that DJ wasn't there.
"Um, sure. Just don't, you know, don't fuck anything up."
"OK OK."
I slipped through the burning bodies of the boys in my dark gingham, skirted the solemn edge of the Wave Tamer 60,000, and dashed into the toilet.
The tiles were cool.
I pressed my face to the edge of the sink, letting a pressure of pinkness fade from my cheek.
I felt around in my purse for the ESP packet; it had been sulking in the farthest corner of my purse and it took a minute to withdraw.
I clasped the plastic greedily; a small, crinkly representative of my future. My madame Blavatsky. There was even a titanic eye emblazoned over a stylized wave on the damn thing. How prophetic, I thought. How fucking prophetic.
Now I was standing straight again, leaning against the Crest-white sink whose tap I had turned on to provide the requisite undercurrent of moan. Also, I didn't want anybody to hear what was going on. My embarrassed conscience was audience enough, I figured. Getting pregnant was not smart. And I was not getting it, if I could help it.
I lifted my skirt to my ribs and held it there with my elbows. I waddled towards the toilet until I had sort of half-straddled it. I pulled my panties to half-mast with the hand that held the urine tube provided so all-knowingly by the ESP manufacturers. I tried to think of Niagara Falls booming across the Canadian border, Victoria Falls enclosed in the steamy body of Africa, the faucet that leaked at Carlos' house, the cold drop of sweat that shivvered down my leg....
In Zen and the Art of Archery, the author,--- a German living in Japan,--- says that the great Zen Masters of the far east had confided in him that the secret of striking the target is to not aim. One must not will anything. The arrow simply gravitates to the lurid red eye at the far end of the field. Zip, snap! The archer and the target are one. But take it from me, after fifteen hectic minutes spent locked in that closet under the imbecilic whirr of a plastic vent chirring its indecipherable mantra above me, fumbling with that tiny urine tube under a blackly blinking florescent bulb, the secret to good aim is a well-placed trigger finger.
I put a drop of the active agent required into the tube and shook it blue.
Now the key thing was to wait ten to twelve minutes and see if the blue tube fizzed to blood-pink. If it did, I was dead. If it didn't, then I could continue my existence in the blue as before.
Thirty seconds passed.
The wait was killing me.
Oh, God. A lump in my breast. like a trapped mouse, furtive under fat rolls of me, burrowing towards my one warm spot, immersed in my liquids. A drowning rat. It moves loosely under my thumbs, fishy, forlorn. A dissolved ball of coal that can't ignite anymore, can't add its little flame to my flooding torch, my life's pyre: the hobgoblin romance of family, my first lost cause; then the hormonal glory of early adolescence, the red rush of menstruation. Shakespeare's men used pig bladders to get the same effect in stage fights. The Sword and the Bladder, now playing in VCRs everywhere.... And then that silly line of men... slouching, fingering their cigarettes, the fill-ins standing around while I waited for my own existence to blossom and explode in blisses. And how many friends? How many attempts at the fusion of friendship? How many women trusted and loved? All I can see now are minced faces, everything gone up in the fireworks.
But at least it's my tumor, if it is a tumor, my injury, my stabbed bladder. An ownership.
I fell back on the bed and let the past encroach on my lumped heart
I couldn't for the life of me even remember how I had discovered it lurking there like a headless Loch Ness monster--- its splintered fins locking on my ribs. When was the last time I had pledged the flag?
Well, I knew that I had to climb into the lonely boat and submerge myself and photograph it.
I called Gary.
. . .
I palmed the silver ball back and forth.
Heavy mercury. It rolled slowly across the psychoanalyst's desk, past her children staring into space, then softly into my soft palm.
I was sick of waiting.
Her walls were filled with pastel originals by friends and modernist reprints. Matisse posters, Picasso and photos of Calder's mobiles.
I was sick of the place.
I was sick of my damn mom arranging to "cure" me every couple of months. The first time had been when I was six. She was on some religious kick. I could not see God and the angel like she could, so she convinced herself to give me lessons. I gave the mobile ball a hard squeeze.
She took me into the church, the black box that rose up against the empty sky and a large elm on the corner us kids used to pass every day on the way to the bus stop, kicking small rocks and hopping up and down the curb or walking with one foot on the high curb and one in the street's filmy runoff.
When I was six, she grabbed my hand one day, in the middle of making peanut butter cookies (just as we were getting ready to put the juicy cyclopes Hersey's kiss in the center of each hot sand-dollar of dough), and started out the door.
I was silent, a leaf in her vortex.
Her dress, aqua and red, billowed into my face, and I couldn't see where we were headed until the shadow of the church fell over us and the wind died, allowing me to squint up at the thin, lightless windows full of pretty glass past her thigh.
I stared into the exact blackness, like a cookie cutter had stamped the church's shape out of the sky and all that was left was this tall dark, this windless space, this absence my mom had taken me to with her hands still wet from the kitchen.
"I think this family could use some of this. It never hurts to look for a little guidance outside of yourself, a little organization."
She stopped abruptly and looked into my face.
"Do you know what I mean Carrie?"
Her eyes were wildly dilated. She smiled, brushing some hair off of my nose, and marched towards the invisible entrance.
There was a mordant haste in the way she dashed for the empty altar and knelt. Something unfinished in the motions of her empty hands and her whitening facial gestures. Her lips were moving very rapidly, as if she was racing to the end of a memorized speech, looking at nothing, under a bare light that crowned her hair like spilt paint and threw long shadows under each breast until they linked in a single darkness in her lap, since now her kneeling had degenerated to the point where she was sitting on her heels.
God, it was awful. It was like she was trying to heave her heart through her throat.
Her face was expressionless, except for some clear tears, and her throat continued to work rhythmically, forcing the words, demanding air, insistent as a racehorse before the unanswering altar. I could see the dim, abstract figures of saints and other famous people in the windows. They glittered a little when you moved your head. My mom was really worked up by now. As far as I could see, she might as well have been counting to ten.
We did that twice a day for six weeks.
When she finished, she seemed exhausted and satisfied. Everything in her face began glowing again, like she had just punched somebody out and felt herself being overtaken by an earned weariness, a healthy tired. She practically danced on the way home, my hand in her hand, and even snapped off a flower growing through a rigid fence, announcing its hybrid status as she handed it down to me.
I returned the heavy ball to its black pedestal.
We ate the cookies cold.
. . .
Me and the ceiling exchanged blank looks.
When was Gary coming to take me on my sleigh ride to the x-ray room?
"All right, now, hold still. Don't breathe."
"You don't want me to breathe?"
I looked through a lank fall of hair, my covalent veil, my fallen vale of misery. I saw what I thought was my old friend Gary, a bland male strip of humanity, like a thoughtful bacon, bent over the slick, swollen lump of the machinery, attending to its quiet dials and neon digits. Then the soft figure straightened and turned a harsh face with buglike black-rimmed glasses at me over some intervening metal lobes, and I remembered that I was in the hospital, sharing the flaccid, intermittently healthy, flesh of my breast with a x-ray technologist.
"We don't want anyone to breathe." He smiled vaguely under the bug eyes. "Just pretend you're drowning."
I shut my lungs off. I waited for the blue ray of light to come and pass through me, illuminating the flesh nearest my heart, the part of me I had covered as a child reciting the pledge of allegiance. Like chocolate covers a chocolate turtle. I remembered the warm hurt of holding my breath too long in the pool, when the outline of your lungs hardens and goes bright, and dizzy angels start to whirl in your brain, just before the lights go out.
The blueness moved through me. A radar sweep through sinister distances, attempting to nab the speed violators skidding into death before all my Foodtown coupons had been traded in. Sustenance Muffins vs. the Cancer Raiders. Exciting all girl-girl roller derby, don't miss out on the action. the blue light sinking into me, I tried not to breathe, tried to help the friendly fisherman find his nutritious fish.
He stood behind a glazed lead wall with goggles on, attempting to inspect my bones and sorrows, my clasped tragedies condensed and strained to this sour ounce of pseudo-cancer, of maybe cancer, the true killing tumor. This white, frail shadow on a black, overexposed film.
"OK. OK. Just one more set and we're finished."
The goggles stared at me through a sealed tank slit.
I was pressed between two sheets of clear glass. My heart ticked. Red, alert, mysterious beneath my collarbone, licking vaguely at my throat like a feather. A tender flamelet of steady attention; some blase, pulsing hurt.
My lungs continued to sink and stiffen in my chest, like lumps of grey ice held strugglingly under. Rebelliously alive as a choking child, like cornflower-blue, asphyxiating twins. The helpful technologist droned on behind the green stare of his x-ray specs, each word a drunken midget's footprints hardening in the slick concrete of my fading consciousness.
The blue light sliced through me.
I was finished. When he unscrewed me from the machine, I felt that I was having my breasts handed back to me. I held them with crossed arms as if they were about to slide off my body.
I don't know how we ended up on that desolate road at 2 a.m., but I was driving. We were headed somewhere. I felt a lurking presence and looked over at the passenger seat. It was Gary. My brain was numb, as if it were recovering from a sudden drop in altitude. I fumbled to shut the radio off, which I thought was blurring into a whining variety of static, but it wasn't even on.
"Hey, we can live without that, can't we?"
I squinted into the churning haze of the road and concurred. "Um."
"So where is this Sushi Bar?"
Sushi? Is that what I was in search of out here with the ticks and garter snakes? A groundhog rolled off the road in the headlights. Somehow I did have a vague urge to feel a tongue of fish unfurl along my tongue....
"This must be it."
A battered paper lantern kept skipping against a dark pole to the right. I turned in, enjoying the mild rise as the car turned onto the private paving.
Everything else on the little strip was closed. But there was a warm knot of cars near the entrance to the Suishi Bar, collected under one of the dispersed parkinglot lights. Our car ended up just beyond the pink fringe of its welcoming halo.
"OK."
Who was Gary talking to? He popped his door open and slid out, then held the door open for me as I maneuvered over the insistently nuzzling obstacle of the stick shift and slid out on his side after him. The night air was very close and too warm for talk.
The Dutch Boy paint store had kept its lights on. Inflated, larger-than-life Hansels receded at fixed intervals into the cavernous lightness of the store, mauve brushes held in sturdy peach hands, and shivering a little from the action of the air vents.
I understood that sort of verbless suspension, the expectant air, the crowning dust, the enormous hollow child almost all the way in the back trying to hold up his wilting brush, the slipped suspender.
"Come on."
Gary was holding the door open again. I wondered what I would have to maneuver over to get out this time. Or was I in something now that I was slipping out of by going in?
I rushed through the open door.
You could feel the air drag out of the building when Gary shut the door behind me.
...
I didn't know where I wanted to be-- let alone who I wanted to be-- I just knew that I didn't want to go back to my apartment and touch anything Carlos had touched or be stuck considering my riddled body with the TV on, its riddled light unreadable.
Later, Gary dumped me off at my parents house.
The glimmering windows grimaced to see the prodigal return, and the red door opened to eat me.
My fagged out and wrong-way friend left a death note:
I have accomplished the fact.
We wept for years.
Dada stopped polishing his shoes. That was his big self-therapy,polishing them. He could look into those brown loafers and find his soul. All I ever found was a slightly acrid stench, the polished leathers stiff and foreign in my hands.
The sideways rain ranged from blue to gold to black. It was pouring outside.
It felt like the house was drowning.
I had a stuffy head cold. Cottonmouth. I rattled around the house, glancing into halffilled pillbottles, avoiding mirrors where my swollen and sick countenance would rise up at me unexpectedly like a helium-filled balloon. I pulled shades tight and closed doors which led into spare rooms.
I came to the room which was the last place he was the last time he came over.
He turned around in front of me on the way in:
"You dream gently," he had said to me. "You can still escape."
Then we listened to The Replacements for about an hour, and some old Clash his older brother had taped at a concert in '78. I forget what we did after that. I always forget what happens.
I looked around the room.
It was clean and serious. There was a bed and a desk with a chair on blue carpeting. the tapeplayer was in the right frontseat of my car waiting for me to get a car stereo.
He was lying asleep in the gravid purples of his blood, when they found him, the blood clouding the stiff pillow like an escaped dream.
I had to get out of there.
Why had he done it anyway? Undone his buttons, let the snaps crackles, the skin--his skin-- appear and dissolve like unwrapped butter, a vanishing mellowness? Were his sweet nerves reversed? A heavy levity lay in everything he said, I remember. He had a softness for violence directed at himself too, I remember, his unattended cuts; and a way of walking as if offering an apology....
His assertions were various and dramatic.
A consistent simpleness sweetened his demeanor, as if he were always talking to cats instead of people.
What the FUCK were you thinking, you asshole?
His clothes always smelled like clean fumes.
And so it was, with the memory of that smell, that I stood in my parents' house, like a statue, not moving for two hours while the memories of my long dead friend came running back into my skull involuntarily, shoving aside what was there (undone laundry, a slight twitching pain in my left foot, etc) and replacing it with an unstoppable moviola of the distant past.
One whiff of that intoxicant, and I was hooked. Clubbed and mugged into the cinema of remembrance for at least two solid hours. Don't kid yourself. What's past is not past.
Here is what the tape in my brain displayed:
. . .
His very gestures too seemed to indicate (so to speak) a growing intolerance with the entire, febrile world of human feeling. There was entirely too much grasping and sleeve-tugging going on among people with things as they were. Every point of his speech was accompanied with a dismissive sideshake of the hand nearest his audience, as if he were throwing off a thin sheathing of dirty water and wanted only to recover his hand in its original, unsoaked and unsmeared, dry condition.
It was in this way that K began to indulge in an almost spiritual waste of his talent and time.
There was a weighty pause in his speech, where formerly only the lightest --- and most expressively lighthearted, let it be added--- harmonies had gathered. The gravity of his look conveyed more of a puzzled, or self-astonished, tone than anything else-- to those who knew him swell, that is; it was the instantaneous, almost snapped-off absence of the man's habitual buoyancy that struck me most resoundingly and with the greatest emotional effect. One looked on the blurred physiognomy with the soft recognition of a myopic turning his numbed eyes over the few, familiar objects of a simple room.
He approached life now as with the familiar ache with which an asthmatic confronts the heavy atmosphere. each day was something of a chore, a regime of rehearsal that kept one too weary for any final performance. and the continual, punishing effort of such an existence, one felt, watching its slow wearing down of the solemn player who -- it is fair to say-- virtually churned through his daily rounds, was gone through during each sunlit interval for the sole reason that no other option had ever presented itself to the breathless participant.
Although in some things, the humanistic disciplines, for instance, he had once been a rigorous romantic-- demanding the most strenuous contortions of both body and soul-- he was now an indifferent master, contemptuous of over-obvious effort or aNY SIGN OF A STRAINED EFFECT OR TOO-CONSCIOUS WOrkmanship in any article of art. Music, the plastic arts, poetic composition or belles letters--- it was all one! Let the man be removed from his experience, he pleaded from his bed. Let the distorting passions drop!
And so, it was of course a great surprise when they found near his able, scrambled body the significant inscription of a poem, composed by his own numb and artless dead hand:
My body is a ghost town.
The quiet lights snuffed one by one,
the inn shut.
The pillow
a grave of feathers
and no retreat
but to dream.
In dreams, your faces
fly out of the dark and fasten themselves
to me like tatoos.
First one face, then another,
inscribing the skin and flaking off.
Blue inks
step through a ruined circulation, an empty
house crowded with scarves, bloods;
The saloon's wild door
awake in the night wind. Nearby,
A final shootest
picks his fingernails with a quick smile,
nervous, inevitable.
My fledgling hand flew up to my own, stunned and wronged, heart; an unpleasant lump interceding between my fingers and my blood pump.
I was so happy to be home.
Which hand had he used to undo himself? Which heart had responded?
I lay stunned and drugged on a queen-sized mattress. Sun-dried and tongue-tied. After my big afternoon in the backyard. Dahlias and low morningglories given noplace to crawl. Neighbors shouted and played in muted invisible voices behind immense bushes. Mother was roasting some flayed thing on the unattended, open-faced Hibachi nearby. Arrogant winds occasionally shook furious bees out of them with a sound of irritated gossip.
Spending the dying afternoon in secret, sacred communion with the loved beasts and jittery insects wore me to the bone.
Rhodhodhendrons took on an horrific, imposing look; shagged heads ,leaned down with rough looks. I imagined moonlight along the dark leafblades, the memory of a ductile shimmer, some characteristic softening of decay or dissolution after the initial stiffness death imposes, some breakdown of even pure light's accuracy and ability to shuttle images-- some reflection reflected. This was an inbred defense against the afternoon's immediate harshness, the stable, nearly eternal quality of its fixtures.
I had noticed the rationalistic preposterousness of my nation edging towards some armed conflict all summer. Any bruise or wound would do to amuse the starveling camp of jackdaw idiots. Amusement mends what hard times wrench awry, as they say. Or do they merely gesture? Hip deep in the gesture mere myself, I hesitate to say....
I played with my lopsided top on the cobbles.
Maybe I had lost my little touch in the great shove of events. I don't know.
Shiva-willful in her spotted dress, my little sister came tumbling out of the house and down the steps onto the green level sward where the cement birdbath, a few drowned insects, and myself waited in the mirrory sunlight. Each heart on her darling smock had a neat crease or ironed pleat running crisply through it, leaving most of the plump designs half in the red shadow of their sunlit sides.
It was all pretty symbolic, if you ask me. Little dark-hearted witch.
"Whatcha doin'?" Somehow her innocence struck one as insufferably smug.
"Watching you," I responded, watching the top slow down, lose its gyroscopic balance, and trace an awkward scrawl on the beaten bricks.
"Oh wow!"
She grabbed the top and revved it up, pumping the wooden knob robotically as the sinisterly twisted metal rod disappeared into the heart-shaped bulk of the top's increasing blurr. Rf. Whitman's lilac-leaf, Adams' dynamo, Ahab's pulsing spearhead, Poe's pounding pump under the wheezy floorboards, and maybe even sneak a peek (when Dad's not looking) at Grey's anatomy.
"Oh, wow!"
The skittering gyrations pleased her.
I was not so easily amused. Or mended, for that matter.
I tipped the fragrant birdbath into the sizzling Hibachi. Furious smokes escaped from the dead coals. I bowed down before the low grate.
For my sincere offenses I now seek sincere pardon. What they may have been, I do not know. Neither what they may be. A sweet puff of steam blew thru the grate, obscuring its dark intercistes with a clear dimensionless whiteness. I breathed the supple fog the rose up to my face. No scent, disappearing into a soft, moist touch that consoled the nose. A calmness in the distressed water that allowed one to continue breathing, no matter the shock or depth of the sin committed.
My sister's sweet doll stared at me through blank leaves. Its small arms were jerked away and up-- as if the tiny girl had given up on giving up.
I pulled her by her thin hair towards the blinking fires. Why did she have to lay there and stare at me?
Her dress crumpled and bubbled under my crunching fist.
What should I do with her? Her dress, red emblem, flipped over her face and obscured the insistent wink of misery I had spied there.
My sister was busy singing to the dog in the rhododendrons. She held his wet face in her hands as she crooned, her face itself as pale as fresh plaster.
I lowered the blank doll into my flaunting flames headfirst, its tender ankle pinched between my young thumb and insistent forefinger. The red hair curled away from the greeting red of the fire first, but then gradually began to blacken and lapse back downwards to its destruction. Inevitable, relaxed.
I watched her straight midriff go and no heart burst out at the side. No jesus-image to consign to the pyre.
My dress itched like burlap, as if I had on a simple burlap shift, angering my nipples and sliding grossly over my lumped shoulderblades. For an instant I felt hot and unrepentant. I spit into the invisible basin that served as my impromptu altar.
Next thing, I was holding my own cotton shift in a bunched double fistful over the fire, waiting for the patient hem to ignite. It did, and I threw the bulk of the material on the grate. My face was bursting with sweat. I put my bra, panties and socks on the smoldering pile. I watched the careful fingers of fire reclaim what I had released.
Fuck this, I thought, my hair is getting frizzed out.
I was ready to stand up and shake off my numb constellation of feelings-- each feeling a bone spur waiting to be clipped from its infected joint,-- when something in the featureless swirl of steam attracted me back to its blitzed essences again.
Swish.
Had I heard my mom swing through the screen door at my back? My invisible sister behind the green bush was singing still.
I studied the colorless eddying.
Time passed like ashes falling.
I felt lonely and defoliated.
Always when in these umber moods I would give the implacable Hillary a ring. Every time I talked to her I had the sensation that I was throwing myself up onto a bridge from the chaotic rigors of the sea; her golden gates rose shiny and hooped above my seamy fogs.
"Hel-lo."
"Um, hello. What're you doing?"
She sounded the same. Competent, vital.
"Carrie?"
"Yes."
Her voice let you know that she had the ability to divert waters in an emergency,-- in order to save the homestead from a flash flood, for instance.
"John and I are just attacking each other's, um, backne."
John, her boyfriend. Someone to share her skin problems with.
"Ah." She paused. "Um, why? What's going on?"
"Blab blab blab."
I went on and on about something, but I don't remember what. I must've talked for an hour or so straight. I blabbed and blabbed. My body felt like it was vomiting gallons of voluptuous blood. The way that the condemned kneeling at the guillotine spout and spout. But it was a good feeling too. An anorextic purge surge ridding myself of body lint.
"Nothing, really," I concluded when I finally surfaced from my blabfest. "I'm over here at Morningside."
Morningside, the mental health facility for overly conscious women with rickety daughters suffering from the contrast between their elevated backgrounds (EB) and grim grimmer grimmest reality (GGGR). The suffering daughters apparently didn't know that anyone with a sufficiently inflated EB is supposed to be able to step on, over or wade through even the grimmest GGGR without crimping her evening pumps or getting more than the occasional blop of hairstyling gel on the thumb of her elbowlength velvet gloves from pushing particularly ugly heads of GGGR down.
"Oh."
She said it as if a tremendous bubble had formed at her lips and she was pushing it out without trying to break it, the globe that had formed at her lips with that syllable, the world of difference between her and me.
"Oh," I echoed.
"Look, if you don't like it, just tell them to go to hell. Run away. I'll pick you up at the end of the field, no problem."
"But you don't have a car."
"I can get my Dad;'s car. He'll never know. You can hang out here in the west side of the house until things are better. It's no problem. That couch in the book room is big enough for three people to sleep on. Well, it has been, anyway."
Sane. Rational. Content. Alive. What did I have to do with any of these things? Hillary virtually vibrated at the other end of the line with resources and hope.
John thrubbed her back.
I could hear the air purr out of her with each hard tap.
Her father's car, a heavenly Jaguar, would swoop from the gilded hills of Hillary's neighborhood and kneel at the curb at the far end of the field, faintly purring. All I had to do was to ask for it to be there. Well, what was I going to do? I could see Hillary: complete, compliant, waiting on the other end of the line, the unsubmerged half of our own Atlantic cable, staring with interest out the window, the clear globe she had blown before-- only now grown huge, larger than her head, larger than her body, larger than the room where she lay with John.
It was big enough now, incorporating the red Jag, lifting over the cozy brick chimney, glinting as the hill was engulfed by its protecting shell, its faint greenaqua tinge with the humming edge still expanding, expanding to cover now the neighborhood, now the whole restful hillside where Hillary lived.
And I knew that, no matter how long or how desperately I clung to that other, far submerged end of the line, burbling my life to her, inching my way into her dreams and concerns, that I would never, never in the millions of eons of our friendship, be able to step through the shimmering, translucent edge of that globe to stand beside the purring car and the thrubbing boyfriend, or sleep on that couch where dreams harassed no one but came and broke as naturally as waves, quiet waters shaken to a momentary fitfulness in that overarching, green globe.
I hung up the phone.
The lightbulb and I played a game.
I watched its misted rays enter the air like the yanked-out-of-place fragments of a day-glo halo. I eyed its switched-on mists until I felt myself lifting. Floating. Rising. I would try and try to climb up and disappear, like the spider into the waterspout, into its flaming lake, suspended above me-- it appeared-- by God.
It was the sole dangerous fixture of my room.
Everything else, the rubber sheets, the padded bedposts, the bolted-down bed, the bland cornerless table with its Tupperware waterglass, everything, had been tamed and denuded like a buffed cuticle.
But the lightbulb still reared and glared above me with its occult glass eye.
The walls and ceiling were an undifferentiated white, displaying an even-- indeed almost maddeningly even-- luminosity.
At times, lost in the rigged stare of the bulb, it seemed that the featureless ceiling and walls themselves formed a sort of little globe, that I was actually half submerged or half suspended inside a milky teardrop, with the small, flaring bulb its illuminated link to some gigantic weeping eye. That's when the game would really begin.
I rocked back and forth on the bed.
My white hands, the love doves, shifted and flew to the private pleat in my pants, or was it the downy mound of my gown? A warm moon beamed on me from above. My hands pulled aside the svelt felt of my underpants, the heavy negation of touch that their interposition between my body and my body implied.
Soon there was a wet feather fluttering inside me.
I was obeying a levitation that my forgotten body had urged on me, working a fervency in me to dullness, a general glow or halo that spread itself evenly throughout my injured skin, the radiant rush of a red flush. Did my black eyes dilate and darken as the light brightened? Perhaps, but my eager consciousness had narrowed to the circle of light chirring at my head.
The feather leapt up against my tightened belly.
A golden gush of bloods lifted through me I could feel my heart contracting by urgent inches. Contracting,, gasping, telling itself the rumor over and over again: I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive. My simple nipples, green and young instead of pink or mauve with lust, slithered against the simple shift tenting them. A tongue of heated breath itching and tickling them from my downturned face.
What was happening? My lead feet were anchored in torn clouds. My lungs were pinched and red inside me. My eyelids, illuminated from the inside now, helped me to disappear into the bulb's uneven emanations. My ears were closed holes to everything but the interior thrub of my thoughts, my thoughts an absolute blank.
Something uttered its wave of love through me, moving my uterus and its attendant frills into my locked skull. My skull battered against the winking light, the bright veins of its lonesome,-- only lonesome-- pulse.
An amoeba's transparent body survives the transparent weight of the ocean; divides and thrives nevertheless, doubling, quintupling the light. That's how I was among my well-lighted acres. My skin receded. My bones soft. The water in me worked towards the outer water. I had been hip-deep before, under the unconscious gauze of childhood and its sinlessness, but now my collarbone was under. Everything was warm and my hollow throat ached to inhale liquids, to help the solemn suction of my buried heart use and inhere to the mercuries blazing about the chosen chalice of my body.
And then, as my hands the size of fins were crimping my hips apart, I felt something young and hungry tear through me, past me, into me... out of me.
I guess the lunar connection between myself and the light had always been chancy at best, anyway, but now that connection was irreparably severed, the stinging filament that had held us in its orange noose, as a pair of wounded sparrows subject to a single shotgun's passing blast, had snapped. The sound of separation was as faint and unmistakable as the aluminum loss of an astronaut's umbilical line in weightlessness. That same metallic titter edged away by the returning lapse of silence.
Now I had fallen back to the alienated capsule of myself.
I bobbed in black waters. Moments elongated, the ceiling disappeared, for the first time in my life, the bed hurt under me a little, the bedding crinkled and abstract, the pale pillow holding up my head to witness the desperate tangle of the green gown pulled up above my navel. But that hunger was still there, so strong in its rip-tides that it disoriented, made my head ache and my hands pull against me with the repetitious lunge of desire. that hunger was in me, and because it was in me, it was in everything about me. It soaked the furniture, it worked in my chest like a furnace. It made my cells ache.
Suddenly there was nothing in the room but myself, my hands, and my body. And this was a result of the hunger as well, since it was a hunger for reality, for the touch and hurt of real things that the real thing of myself was no longer able to stave off from its bitter, embattled isle of ego. And I wanted my hands, with their wrenched fingers intense as a typist, to be there, circling and diving against my limber clit, changing a rictus of the spirit for one on the body at last. At last.
I worked my fingers against myself with a delicate haste.
I felt a shudder stop my throat, and then the long glory of easing away, the muffled lump of a receding storm still veined with lightning. My legs were tense and splendid. My ass warm and consoling as the first, cold and distilled, drop of desire skated along its indifferent surface and sank into the sheets.
. . .
I guess it was a good sign, really, a forgiving. Something like broken charcoal in myself being forgiven by some thing pure and silvery.
But had it really begun? The New Life and all of that? Had it begun before my noticing? Was I really free at last?