Bunny and Shark (7 page)

“Bunny,” he growls from the table. “Where have you gone?”

You pet the purple ceramic swan where a dry washcloth is resting. “Hey you, I have one just like you at home, but she's peachy peach.” You cast one last look at the array of women's cosmetics, perfumes, and brushes, but now they have no appeal, they look dusty and bleak. Objects trapped in another time.

Then come back to where the man is at the table, slouching with legs wide, do a line of coke that he sets up for you on the hinge of his foldover, just above his pubic hair, his pooch – you grin at him as you inhale the sour waft that puffs out of his unbuckled pants. You do several more lines. Pulling away, with a flip of your hair and a sniff, you watch him as he eases back into his chair. He's busy tipping back his bourbon glass until all you see is his throat. You feel your neck grow long, you turn towards the alcove of a room far off in the house, you can see it there, some other deep shade of orange, the walls pixelated by serious mirrors lined up like swords. His arrogance, his open shirt which emits imported perfumery and sparse, unruly chest hair, his messy slaps on your ass – it is all familiar.

“Champagne is what we want!” he yells out, slapping the table. “Darling Bunny gorgeous, my new friend,” he reaches out for you. Misses. Laughs. “Why don't you go get us a bottle and serve it up like you would have for the playboys?” he says as he takes another swig from his half-empty of bourbon, and gestures towards a dark hall. You grin at him, feeling detached but game. Barefoot you go, happy to be high and walking away from him. The cases of champagne are stacked in an empty room. They release a gentle clinking memory that streams up inside you: of too many bottles in the arms of the bastard as he'd enter the room yelling, “Tonight we celebrate!” Of endless supply. Easing one out of the stuffing brings on a surge of glory. Back you go to the table on tiptoes, pretending you're wearing the requisite three-inch Bunny heels. But he isn't there. You find the kitchen and open the bottle and place it on a tray with two flutes. You wander like that, still on tiptoes, balancing a tray of champagne on one hand, pretending to smoke with your other, when you hear a whistle. It's him. Upstairs it seems, ordering you to come.

“You're actually going to whistle for me? Jesus.” Something new in you doesn't like this. But you play along because it's his game, ultimately, until you win him over. As you walk through the house, breathing in the crisp smell of wealth, the devil in you rises up again.

“Bunny's back,” you whisper, pinging the flute of one of the glasses against the bay window that overlooks the sea. “Cheers.” A meaningful sound of response: a barrage of nearby waves. You feel the pulse of the ocean pulling you towards that small opening in the window when a warm wet mist hits your face, creating a precise longing to be naked in those waters. But you tear yourself away. “Coming,” you say softly, in no particular direction.

You enter the bedroom soundlessly and see your man laid out, face-up, on his giant round bed. A reddish glow from the mini chandelier augments the pinkness of his skin, the rise of hairless pouches and folds on his chest. He seems to have half-stripped down, resting one hand on his limp cock, then passed out.

You set down the tray on the lip of the divan (in the shape of real lips), pour yourself another glass, and stand there looking around at the room, ready now to approach him. You had looked forward to sleeping on a real bed, and forging new alliances, but now the man looks uncannily dead to you, and as you creep closer along the white carpet and let the tips of your nails graze his face near his mouth, you strain to feel for his shallow breath. It's barely there. The bubbly stings your throat as you take sip after sip, watching him like a hawk. Now you don't want him to wake.

You want to pour champagne all over him and his bed. To straddle him with your heavy legs and bite his neck way too hard so he screams. To squeeze his hips with your thighs as a small trickle of blood stains the seam of his white shirt at the collar, to pull his head back by the measly hairs that crown the bald spot. You fucked me over, you bastard. Nails digging into his chest, making welts, his eyes snap open wide with surprise. It makes his cock hard to be dominated. But you slam your hand over his eyes, gripping and kneading the skin at his face the same way you do with your other hand on his cock. Don't move bastard. But he extends his arm, ever so slowly, afraid. “I see you bastard, whatcha doin'?” You allow his hand to drift over to the other side of the bed where it flips a switch that sends the bed into a roar of invisible electronics. The bed begins to turn like a parade float. You grin. Watch him bleed. Bend down and rub your face into the blood so it smears, so you can smell it. Come. Come get him. Even if I love him. Love him. Hate him. Want him. Hate him. Love him. You are whispering now, chanting. The rancid scent of his blood makes you want more. Makes you hungry. Your tongue is dripping with blood-striated saliva. Sparkly lights from the ocean penetrate the bedroom. You watch him dully, almost dead-eyed. Everything glistens now cool and wet with the saltwater pouring from both your bodies. The room is circling with dizzying speckled lights, then his cum is spurting and with that you shake the champagne bottle, wasting it, screaming out a low-pitched moan.

At that moment his eyes open for real. They are so clear you think he must have been waiting there, quietly watching you the whole time. The champagne sizzles icily all over the bed. It lubricates your skin so you slither one thigh off of him. You want to get out of here, but now the man has reared up onto his hands. You watch streams of white rivulet to a V at his dick. He flips you over, pins you down, but you are too wired to be held by him, and without a thought, you rise to your knees, push your ass against his belly then bang the bottle against his head. The sound is dull and the bottle doesn't kill him.

“Oh, for Christ's sake . . . alright you bitch.” And he falls back onto the bed, moaning gently, rubbing the thicker portions of his black hair over and over into a dark red mat, until he grabs the bottle himself and cracks it against the side of your face. The blood cascading from your temple, down the entire side of your body, only gives you strength. Not yet, bastard. And like an animal you back away on the bed, watching his every move until he goes still and you hear him snore and snort in fits.

Your first few steps – the blood has gone all the way down to your foot – leave mulish red prints until gradually, as you tiptoe back through the house, retracing your steps, they stamp sticky and random. On your way along the hall, there is a pastel room where you see a fresh bouquet. Red roses. And an open closet. Oh, yes, a woman lives here. Wanting to look, to take things – it occurs to you you should steal money at least, but that thought goes straight out of your head. Money hasn't been necessary or relevant to your survival. Still, you look through the closet. Fancy women's clothes, rows of extravagant heels. The wooden hangers crash as you swat through the dresses. Into a small bag you stuff something red and silk and toss in a pair of shoes. You wind a scarf around your head to staunch the blood still trickling from your temple.

Then you creep down the stairs. Dizzy and shivering on the outside, but on the inside, stealth and calm.

As you move fast and rhythmically to the door you aren't sure what it is you're running from or to. You hit the metal gate in front of the door with your entire body, expecting it to swing open, but it doesn't. It's locked from the inside.

You crumple, nearly faint against the door. And you picture that black metal key the man used when you came in, but you were kissing, eating his face, and blind in that moment.

Almost used to it now. Crawl spaces. Hiding out. Waiting for the right moment. But to maintain your focus, you need to be on the move. You need to get back into the water and swim, and for several moments you lose focus entirely as light-headedness feels restful against thoughts of being underwater. But you are trapped in this house. Its open, marbled hallways are claustrophobic. Static objects on the walls: a print of a stylized woman demurely looking out from under a hat, a ceramic shell that juts shiny and menacingly in mauve from the wall; the energy of the villa is blown out and glossy, cut off from the warmth of breezes outside. The hum of the air conditioner sends out radiating waves of depression through your body. You feel the hidden dust, the whiff of a rotten banana in the kitchen garbage, the tang of bubbly left over in your mouth. What was familiar and comforting is now eerily foreign. You are trapped. Need something to do. Thankfully a pack of cigarettes appears in your line of vision. You slump to the floor in the laundry room next to the front door and smoke so you can breathe again. And make a plan. However much you squeeze your eyes shut and beckon the swell of the ocean, nothing happens, you toss between wake and nausea and sleep. You pull damp towels over you to stay hidden and warm. You try to conjure the snake that led you safely to the young man's house, and again get nothing, no guiding image, until finally the girlfriend arrives home in the early hours of the morning. She is careless with the door and you exit without any fuss.

You slip out into the dawn with her things in the bag, running barefoot down Folly Road. The hedges are short and bright, they smell fresh compared to your skin. At the entranceways you see the maids just arrived, you see them bending and gathering. A woman with her dog looks straight into your eyes as you go by.

Day seven dead

(Bunny and Shark.)

T
HE FLASH OF TINTED WINDOWS
, and a car rolls by. You put your turbaned head down and keep walking. Will you be seen? All the bad things that could happen to you race through your mind. For a second, out into the warm, open air, you can't see straight. Then you run a little, get your feet back, feel like you're getting somewhere. Fluttering above the deeper layers of fear are coke-infused images, delusions of grandeur so overwhelming your limbs start to expand, you feel whole feet taller. You feel like your skin is burning and electric. Your eyes sharp, they whip from street to rock face to car to bush, and finally all you see and all that drives you on are the contorted faces of three men: the bastard's mixed expression of agony as he threw you over, the young man grimacing with orgasm, the horrified mask of the last man you just ran from. All three merge together like one great floating head, culminating as the singular expression of your power. Your breath goes shallow. Like you are infused again with dolphin sense. Except with more edge and an appetite for revenge. You question your sudden lack of softness. The image fades, and you become fixated on a lawnmower – your head slowly follows it, and turns, but your body keeps going straight. Bam! You go down. Whimper. What was that? “Shit!” You are disoriented, scrambling with your hands and feet at the garbage you've spilled. Bottles scatter as you make your way back up. You jog-walk away from it, close to the edge of the road. The villas blush a full spectrum of pastel at you as you pass, and your temple pulses with a fresh outpouring of blood. You feel the turban get soaked. Bushes scratch your face and hands, the leaves prick you, they smell of fertilizer. The tang in your nostrils makes you gag.

Your feet burn, are hot, wet and stuck with stones and bits of glass. Blood and pus seem to squirt from multiple openings on the soles of your feet. You stumble, nearly fall, catch yourself on another useless wiry bush. Hold back tears. Hate this scene of black road and bubble-gum houses that never end. Your skin goes cold, then agonizingly hot. Then cold again. A trickle of sweat runs in a dead-straight line down your back. You have to get back there, to the ocean, to the drift-feel of darkness and swimming. Go straight there. To the cool easy pulse of your arms pushing through water. Gentle swift kicks. A straight path to water. Pull yourself together. You aren't sure you won't faint.

You close your eyes and wish hard for the serenity of the green snake's curling pathway. It was so graceful, looping its way into the kingdom of the jungle. For ten seconds, your head feels light and your heart free of any fear. But the drug pains crash in on you again, and sweat blasts through the pores of your body. Get it straight. You just got mixed up. You have to go straight to the bastard. To the source. Just get to the water and wash away all the cocaine. Get strong again. You pull at the gold dress, beg it to stop clinging to you that way. Finally you reach the bottom of the hill. A coconut-seller is hacking away on large green nut with his machete. A jovial group of workers are making their way up to Folly Road. Not down. Like you, but you are tripping on bloodied feet, drenched in sweat, itching like mad.

“The water, the water, it's okay, you're gonna be fine,” scuffling along with your Hermès bag banging against your floppy ass, dropping it as you get near, your feet shushing through the sand, the sting of tiny grains in your wounds somehow exquisite. At the beach you throw yourself directly in. You close your eyes and let the cool saltiness take away all the hot salt from your skin. You lower yourself until your mouth goes underwater. The feel of getting clean of sand, of stones, of blood, of Folly fertilizers and flying bits of cut grass, of steely cars. Stop breathing. Go underwater now.

Bubbles erupt from your mouth. The turban unwinds and your hair inflates like a polyp of yellow cotton. A ribbon of pure red trails in a single, elegant strand alongside you. As you drift outwards, making soft dog paddles with your hands, the faces of the three men in your life loom up again behind your eyelids. The young man. The bastard. The man you nearly killed.

How strong you still are, you think. How capable. It's possible to be a free, glowing being buoyed by the sun and the immensity of the ocean. Look at you out here alone at dawn living off the sea in secret like a happy vagabond: eating food no one notices, wearing clothes nobody even remembers having, sleeping on luxurious boats, one after the next, without a soul finding a trace of you. Betrayal equals freedom, you think.

When something hard and waxen bumps you. You assume you've paddled your way into someone's surfboard, or boogey board. Or skiff with a silent motor attached. The last fits best with the tunnel of water you feel being tugged away from you. A small portion of the sea torn sideways. Right beside you. And then silently coming back into place. Rip then retreat. You blink calmly up at the sky as it comes into instant focus. Clouds split. And the words: do yourself a favour and run! Did you say that to yourself? Scanning fast, there is no boat anywhere near you. Your skin crawls, the faint hint of the sun's heat is gone and all you feel is an intense chill. You can't run on water, dummy Bunny. Calm down. But your heart has gone wild with some other memory, a physical one, rising up in you.

Then it bumps you again but this time harder. Stark awakening now, you see it. You bolt upright.

“Oh my god, no. No! It can't be that. Run Bunny, run Bunny, run!” you whisper. The ocean becomes like thunder roiling up, it seems to lick up around you in flames made of blood from your feet. Your feet. Your fucking feet. Run feet, run, you fucking bloody feet.

You try to run through the tumult of water but it's too deep. It's too hard. The heave of your thighs, you will them to plough through the heavy waves. Oh god, don't get me, don't.

And now on shore you see people coming to life. Tiny figures in the distance pointing at you, running towards you. They are too many impossible metres away from you. And in that flash of terror you recognize him: the young man is there sprinting across the sand.

“You bastard,” you whisper as your face falls flat in three feet of water, and the shark – who is trying to figure out if you are edible, not what you taste like, but what species you are – bites off one of your feet.

And without any more interest, swims off in the other direction.

The splash of your body hitting shallow water. Then the thud of hitting the sand underneath. Then a cacophany of tiny splashes all around you and voices screaming and the slow single wave of blood, the last wave that washes all the way up over your body before the young man and a woman pick you up in their arms.

The ocean returns to a ripple of white caps. Then calmness as the car, with you in the backseat laid out as good as a corpse, tears off in the direction of the family lands.

/ / /

“Which one is it?” Your voice is fragile, distant. Bright, hot daylight swirls around you through the car windows. The upward view a relentless blue sky without clouds. “The right or the left?”

“Lady, you don't know?” says the woman. She's in the backseat with you, frantically tying knots with some kind of cloth. But her face keeps expanding and contracting and the sun is whiting out everything until it all turns black.

Then all around you, quiet blue: cerulean paint and warmish air flowing in different directions like long, soft hair.

“Up to both knees all I feel is fire.” A large dry hand on your forehead.

“We picked you up lady, no one gonna take a person in your state to the hospital. You said it yourself, you got no insurance. No identity.”

Warm hand heavy on your head. You are laid out on a bed in a house fortified by the background sounds of women. The walls are flimsy and the system of fans tremendous. You wonder if the house won't blow down.

“Here lady, here lady, we know what to do.” She is touching the fire in your leg, doing and undoing things. You feel something rip, then seep, as if your leg is metal getting melted down. Your leg seems to run right out of you and onto the floor. When you close your eyes, you smell the sweat roll off the green arc of the snake as it releases itself from one position to the next.

“You had this bag with you, lady,” she says. “You'll wear those pretty shoes again. Don't you worry about that.” On the wall hangs an outfit you don't recognize, all frills and chiffon, bright red silk; not a dress, but a jumpsuit for parties, with slits running all the way from the thighs down to the ankles, tied with ribbons. The ribbons have come undone on the left leg. A fan nearby makes the thin streamers of red silk flutter around the ankle's opening.

“It's my left foot, isn't it.”

“That's right. Now you feel it, right? You lost your left foot to another world, lady. One foot here. One foot in the otherworld. In a way, you a very lucky, lady.” You feel the woman's eyes looking at your closed lids and not ready yet to take in that strange thought, you fall asleep.