Bunny and Shark (8 page)

Day eight dead

(In which Miami is a mural.)

T
HE SCENE REPLAYS
in your mind. How you told them you were once so protected. How, just a week ago, the sea glittered, reflecting a night field of stars that gathered into a singular beast that took you to shore instead of letting you be eaten alive. How instead of staying on land, you swam back to them, and hid. Swam and hid again. All of this comes out of your mouth like a slow string of bubbles as the two of them grunt and shuffle your deadened weight into their car. Beads of their perspiration spot onto your skin, and more from you pool on the plastic seating at your side. In the front seat they murmur politely, saying: “You're okay now.” “Things will be well with you, lady.” “I know her, she'll be fine.” When the car slows to a halt, everything in view contradicts this: the unfamiliar shack that isn't a hospital, the two of them hobbling you towards its ramshackle veranda, your blood lighting up the whole side of the young man's pant leg, the look of terror in the woman who stands at the door, hands covering her mouth.

“But then, somehow, the bastard got me. He got me.” The end of your story comes to you as a curiosity.

“Shhhh,” repeats the woman, whose hands reach out to receive you, and you are lighter than air suddenly at her touch, and what you anticipate as hours of hysteria are instead hours of concentration, all around your lower half.

“No man can make a shark do that, lady.”

You drift in and out of consciousness.

“Maybe you brought that shark to you.”

Why would you do that? It's like some remarkable joke.

“And then he got me!” You yelp it out to the room.

/ / /

Unknown bedroom, high in the jungle. The space expands endlessly in all directions, like the jungle has yawned in answer to you finally opening your eyes. They've forgotten my head, you think. Or my face. You feel the skin of your cheekbones edge its way back towards the openings in your ears. You are listening for the bones inside yourself. Wondering how the rest of you fared through the ordeal, because you ache everywhere, as though all your parts shifted around to the wrong locations. The solidity of your bones, and how they shiver, only reminds you of the stark absence of one of your limbs. You wonder about the body which you'd only really considered skin deep. So easily, gruesomely broken. By the shark.

What otherworld? Where are you, foot?

You open your eyes to the blue ceiling, wanting to speak to the shark, to ask, “Why doesn't it hurt? Why aren't I dead?”

The toes and the toenail polish, the tendons and bones and skin going into the mouth of another mammal. The notion almost makes you hysterical. You feel elevated. On some level you know you're drugged and thoughts spill out perilously. There is always one left if ever you want to measure how things are aging according to your feet, Bunny.

“I'll always have this other foot,” you say, and laugh audibly. It draws a backdrop of women into the room. You'd forgotten about them. They'd gone quiet for hours, for your sake, wanting to let you rest. They bustle into the small room, surrounding you from head to toe.

“Hi there, lady. You must be needing some water.” A woman brushing your hair. Fans roaring up. Your eyes go to an opened window: bright swaths of palm leaves right there, practically entering the room. The oohing and ahing of a younger woman's voice,

“Gianni Versace. That's class.” The girl in front of you holding up a single shoe.

“Where is the other?”

“Shhhh now, lady, never mind. We know you're a bit lost here. You told us all your story, all the trouble you been in. Where you were swimming and sleeping. You've been in a fever for days, but you're okay now, the drugs help it, and the new foot's being made right this second. You won't believe how beautiful it is. We're taking care of that foot. Or where it once was.” She crosses herself. You feel the air whip around her fingers. “I said it already and I'll say it again: those shoes'll be on you in a week, no less! I'm Thule, by the way.”

“Thank you, Thule,” is all you can manage to say. Remembering the car and the young man tying your foot up in a sweatshirt.

You can't imagine what they're on about, the making of a new foot. You'll have to convince them to get you to a hospital is all. But then you remember: you have no identity cards to use in hospitals or for therapy or whatever else this kind of crisis involves.

Instead of worrying, you lap up the drugs and drink the small cups of water and soups that they bring you, and when you taste chicken in the broth it makes you happy in a very basic, futureless way. For now: just this blue house and its people, the jungle outside and the civet smell of the snake moving along the ground away from you, but then always back again to the window to watch you.

You close your eyes, comforted by the din of this extended family whose names you've all forgotten. Comforted by their fussing. It's always been you who's taken care, you who's fussed and served and made change and poured and undressed and sucked them off and wiped up afterwards and looked pretty again, no matter how tired.

/ / /

Bunny, the cigarette girl. Cheap bunny ears on a hairband, bunny tail, cufflinks like a schoolboy's, and a bra stuffed three sizes too big. The raunch under your armpits and gathering in your underwear as you move through crowds of suits and their girlfriends. Girlfriends who sometimes befriend you but who mostly flash you looks as though to say, “I'd gladly tear your heart out.” Halfway though the shift you feel like a bad stain of electric blue moving across chintz carpets – electric blue being the colour of one of your costumes. Everything reeks of cigarettes even though you haven't smoked your whole life. Not yet.

“It's policy that you buy a Playboy lighter with every pack of cigarettes,” you say with your young, tinsly voice. Your long blonde hair falls over their ringed fingers and gets caught in the spokes of the tray hinged at your neck.

Bunny, the card-dealer. You quickly advanced through the Playboy rungs, from cigarette girl to casino dealer.Here's where it got good. With the lacy white bib at your cleavage, standard issue for the girls who deal, you earned more respect from the clients. Plus you were a dash at counting cards: blackjack was easy, and throwing three decks at once didn't phase you. No sweat. Nothing bad happened. No victim stories. None from your girlfriends either, unless they never said. The men always treated you right. The men worshipped the hourglass frame that inspired them to win thousands.

You were good that way. You brought on the lucky streaks. Like the circle of dolphins protecting you. Wheeling around you. The spin of the wheel with chips thrown in by disembodied hands. Voices cheering. Bated breath. A gasp, and a hand to a chest. Then more whirls. Red. Black. White. More cheering.

Now green. The green spins so fast it obliterates the red, black and white. You frown. This isn't any game you know. Your heart tightens with fear, then the spinning slows, the green becoming familiar, and you wait in anticipation. And the snake swivels his head to look you in the eyes. “You left for awhile,” you tell it. You follow the snake's movement to another table on the other side of the room. On its surface, shining instruments are laid out. Then held, one by one, by able hands. The long brown fingers of the doctor. Warm hands holding calipers, scissors, chisels, you don't know the terms. You smell bone and smoke. Skin flap over skin flap. Vessels and nerve endings being turned off like taps. It's a blurry view, but you see how they fold the end of your left leg into a shiny tapered baseball, but smaller, more like a very delicate horse's hoof.

The green snake looks you straight in the eye again. He doesn't want you to look anymore. He holds your eyes as if to say, “Stay here.” So you can focus and not be too scared.

What is happening to your other foot, the right foot, the one that stayed in this world? It is massaged and measured, tipped to a certain toe-to-heel angle and held tight there. Your toes are spread open as wide as a little bird's wingspan. Then the foot is encased in something white and cold and puddingy.

Everything at the end of your body is electric and spinning outwards. Then all goes dull. The snake disappears out the window, blending in so well with the palm leaves you see it only by its movement. But you follow its winding motion, hypnotized by it, until you realize that at some point the right foot has dried in its case. It's become as cold and fixed as a crystal.

After you've slept for what feels like many days, the case gets cracked open. The foot of this land comes of its egg. “One egg for another,” says the snake mysteriously, with its human-shaped mouth, its snake tongue pointing sheepishly out at you. It points to the left foot, the foot that is not of this land anymore, the foot that dissolved into the saliva of the shark's gullet and became part of the island landscape.

But the shark ate you by accident.

You felt it right there, tearing into the base of your calf. And into your heart. Into your chances.

What's left? Was it by accident?

“Right!” the snake corrects, giggling. “The stump looks like an egg!”

That night the shark swam as usual along the night tunnels of the sea. While you laid here, your foot disintegrated cell by cell inside some yellowish-red core, among some grey, gelatinous mess of inconsequential fishes and sea garbage. Poor foreign foot finding itself there. You pray it was consumed in one night, not more. Faster than battery acid, you pray. That it slipped from one state to another, from foot to sparkles, painlessly and without gore. As a ghost might pass through a wall. That it exited through the shark's skin and hung there above the beast, before kicking itself away. By way of more and more distant oceans. Escaping.

In your sleep you sense the snake enter the window, cross the floor and mount the bed. It slithers across your body, up your legs. Over your pelvis. There is something horrific and tantalizing about the snake's clean, dry movement over your hips. You groan at the thought of the young man and how you were once naked under his robe in that big glass villa. But this thought abandons you to the pain that takes over. Sudden. Excruciating. A crushing, burning, gnawing pain confused with a burning sensation around your hips, your pelvis, your vagina. You thrust yourself upwards, every lurking tingle from your foot passes up to your sex and culminates there. You don't even have to touch it – you are burned by the singular point of pleasure, the crepe-like hand that rubs you until you cum, a shudder so blunt and shattering it gives temporary form to your foot again, before releasing into a tiny wet stream.

And then it passes, the snake snaps like a flicked switch, and you understand that it was just a fantasy.

Sweaty, you turn your leg from side to side to be sure no phantom has stayed. “Nothing down there, nothing there at all,” you say. The shark was a message to you, you tell yourself. That's all. The shark had its taste of you, but then let you go.

“Off you go now, back to the land,” it seemed to say. Like it was bored by you. Like you had lingered too long in its territory, in ocean-time, when what you were supposed to be doing was making inroads back to where you once belonged.

“Sharks aren't that bright,” tsk-tsks the snake, bringing you back into the focus of the room. “You think too highly of their motives. Most of their actions are blunders. There are others who will guide you now. Now you are a portrait of the intertwining of land and sea.”

Your eyes wind around the double-helix made by the snake. He is seducing you now with this prospect.

Day nine dead

(The phantom's day.)

THE JUNGLE FALTERS
in its peace, becomes a dank, crushing wilderness. Gruesome thoughts drip like pearls in your mind. They gather into hideous opaline shapes.

Whole. And now unwhole. Broken. Partial. Cut. You lift your head up from the sweat-ringed bed to look at the stump. You wag it up and down. Cringe. You think of a baseball bat gearing up for a game, but the bat is ragged and off-time. It lacks integrity. It is disgusting to you. Mutilated. Unwholesome. Irreversible, a bloodied stump slopping all over the room.

Go back.

You can't get up on it, or walk on it. You gasp. Undo it.

Go back.

I can't. A whistle scream inside each thought. The words fall like spittle, like coddled egg, then spin, then ram themselves up against your forehead. Breathe, breathe. Get out of here. Anywhere else. Be elsewhere. As you calm down, the burn becomes a presence; it moves steadily up your leg and grows into a singular flame ignited in your mind: you can go back. You can kill, set fire, slash. Kill off your whole self, not just the foot.

Then you imagine how that whole foot used to run under the table and up the leg of the bastard, or sometimes even up Coke-Bottle's leg. It depended on your mood. You feel the foot having a life of its own, a memory. The foot dares itself into the past, arches into a shoe, walks places, takes your weight. It's not yours anymore, but it is an entity circling the room, trying to find a place to land.

Foot, where are you?

How, in its last moments, it kicked so hard against the gaping mouth of the shark.

Let the absent foot go. Ignore it. Let it figure itself out.

You are alone. A breeze enters the room and flips a doily halfway over a hairbrush sitting on the dresser. No sounds from the family anywhere in the house. Abandoned and silent, with the drugs draining out of your system, you fall into moments of pure void until the horrors rush in again. And the foot stands above the earth suffocating you, making you want to scream one last time. But after awhile you can only grunt. Whine. Moan. Then just stay still and feel nothing.

From a TV left on in the living room comes a deep, prophetic voice, surely an old movie:

. . . She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent;
there was
something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush
that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the
colossal body
of the fecund and mysterious life seems to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us.
Her long shadow fell to the water's edge.
Her face has a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over inscrutable purpose.
A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward . . .

The flame of the phantom foot races up again from the stump through your calf. It makes itself known. It is stuck to you, you cannot kick it away. So you lie there feeling its power set fire to the room, and you wait.