Going Native (8 page)

He pulled into the driveway and sat, engine running. She looked at him. He stared out the windshield. "Get out," he ordered.

"I'm in a mood, C. You know that."

"Got some shopping to do."

"Me, too."

"Serious shopping. New people."

"What new people? Where?"

"Out. I'll bring you a present."

"How long you gonna be?"

"Quicker you get out, quicker I'll be back."

She opened the door. "One hour," she said. She got out. "I mean it, too." She slammed the door. The Galaxie began rolling back down the driveway. She tottered after for a few steps. "See if they got any moon rock," she called.

She couldn't tell him how afraid she was to be alone. He might use the knowledge against her someday. She descended into solitude as into an abyss, and once a certain depth had been achieved, the fear came after her huge as a hungry mouth. She spent the first hour alone ransacking the house, finally finding, after checking there twice, a beautiful white nugget nestled in the battery compartment of the VCR remote, where she herself had hidden it in anticipation of such a rainy night. She stoked up the pipe. The smoke hanging before her in voluptuous silken shreds she wanted to lick, like human skin. She wandered aimlessly through the emptiness of the house, shedding her clothes, a different article in each room. She finished up in the middle of the mattress, where she sat, chin on her chest, unmoving, as the bar of natural light crept up the wall, shriveled, and was gone . . . Above her head, fluttering like paper toys among the bamboo rafters, are a pair of astonishing birds in the iridescent blues and golds of tropical fish. She is seated on a rock ledge, legs dangling in the burbling clarity of the freshwater pool in her living room. The tranquillity of life in a faraway beach house of thatched elegance. In the neighboring bungalow that famous blond actress with the teeth from As
the World Turns
or
Guiding Light
or
The Bold and the Beautiful.
She is quietly aware of a new, unaccustomed body; a bright, unveiled self. She is horny 24-7. The bar is an open-air hut on a shore redolent of brine and orchids. Her daiquiri is an iced goblet of pale cream from which protrudes the curvaceous shape of a peeled banana. The flesh of the banana is flawed by the presence of several bruises, brown moons of decay. She is a regular, the girl everyone knows. Her conch-pink toes splayed in aesthetically pleasing contrast against a floor of pure white sand. The light here is of an exhilarating transformative nature, at its touch an instant landscape of essences. The brown bartender wears no shirt. The bar towel squeaks around the inside of the glass. His dangerously blue eyes have no bottoms. She understands her stay at the Hotel Delirioso can be, if she chooses, extended indefinitely, but whether or not she can meet the price is a question with no clear answer. She has trouble making the rent on this present body, whose streets and alleys, now that she noticed, were submerged in the clamor of a mob, the weight of their collapsing bodies bearing her stoically down. A headful of corpses. The load she trundled through the mud of misty days. God, no wonder she was tired all the time. This was the trouble with stokin' it. After the peerless joy of the aerial view, it led you down, down to the mazes under the ground, down close corridors to cold rooms she did not want to visit. Like the morgue, for instance. Her touching inability to routinize the procedure, briskly wrap the deceased in sheets for the ride in the disguised gurney past unsuspecting patients and visitors down to the refrigerated drawers, and each one of those white mummies she prepared with her own hands she could remember by chart, by ward, by face, information she couldn't seem to lose, along with an image of herself as grim jumpmaster on a jumbo transport, holding the door for each numbered processee to sail out -- into what? Fucking enemy territory, that's what.

The table was black. The TV was gray. The walls were white. She leafed through
Vanity Fair,
the darkness moving stealthily in, a silent and respectful maid. She got up and roamed around the room, anointing each cold candle with the trusty Bic. She returned to the mattress and read intently in the pages of
TV Guide,
visualizing favorite shows, old movies. Scarlett O'Hara was one of her favorite characters. So was Nora Charles. So was Ratso Rizzo. She made a mental checklist of each show she would watch tonight if there were power. She saw herself watching those shows. The image feed was inexhaustible. Her life signs were modulating nicely. Then the door chimes sounded and she was up on her feet without any awareness of having moved, a piece of trembling statuary, heart like an alarm clock, prickly sensations rolling up and down her body, uncertain whether she had heard anything at all. She looked anxiously about the room as if there were another person, another object to tell her what to do. Then it happened again, a sonorous measured ding-dong that broke her posture. She pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, grabbed the .44 from under the mattress, and cautiously made her way to the front of the house, fingers running lightly along the walls as if she were traversing the unsteady passageways of a ship. She stopped in the shadows, well away from the pale parallelogram of streetlight thrown carelessly across the uncarpeted floor. Through the picture window she could see him, a man in the dark at her door. Jiggling up and down. He pressed the button a third time, turned away to inspect the empty street. There was a strange car in the driveway. He leaned his face in against the window. A block of solid stillness, she did not flinch.

"I see you," he said. "C'mon, open up."

Her heart was going like wild hooves up her chest. She raised up the gun with both hands.

"I'll break this fucking door, you know that." Nails tapping rapidly on the glass. The sound -- this scraping of talons -- startled her and she pulled the trigger, she thought she pulled the trigger, nothing had happened, and now the door knob was being violently shaken and the chimes were ringing without stop and the voice was at her head, threatening, "C'mon, Latisha, open up." Latisha? She hid the gun in a soggy bag of garbage in the corner and unlocked the door.

Arms flung for an embrace, he entered the house grinning at the notion of being surprised he'd caught her at home.

"Reese." She nodded curtly, holding him at a distance with the dead sound of her voice.

"Hey, is that any way to be?"

"What do you want?"

"So paranoid. What's happened to you out here in the 'burbs? That old geek you're fucking messing up your mind?"

"He's not old."

"Let's see him, bring him out, he hiding under the bed or what?"

"He's out."

"Don't lie to me." His eyes were looking away, through the walls toward the other rooms.

"Oh, okay, I forgot. He's around the corner, hugging an Uzi, waiting to blow your fucking head off."

"Relax, I believe you. Why don't you turn on a damn light so we could see each other's faces or something?"

"I like this, it's more romantic, don't you think?"

"I miss you, darlin'."

"Please, not Elvis, not tonight. I've got a headache."

"Hey." He raised his arms and revolved in a slow circle in front of her. He looked at her, he shrugged his shoulders. This was his I'm clean, I'm innocent act. Innocent of everything. In his right hand the familiar rumpled gym bag containing the stash and the hardware.

"How'd you find me?"

"Streets are all connected, baby, you just follow them out."

"You seem different." He didn't, actually, but she had forgotten the full effect of his presence. She went numb looking at him.

"I know, I just keep getting better." He noted her expression and laughed, shrugging his shoulders again. "That's what they say."

"Whaddya got?"

"Well, I got this" -- he held up the bag -- "and I got this" -- pointing an incredibly long-nailed finger at his crotch.

She came toward him without a word, like someone pretending to be sleepwalking, and she dropped to her knees and unfastened his pants and slid them down to his socks, all the while staring deep into his eyes but giving nothing back, the way she knew he liked it.

"What's this?" she asked. A dangling length of white string was knotted so tightly around his scrotum that his constricted balls, pressing hard against the drawn and shaven skin, resembled the twin lobes of a grotesque miniature brain.

"When I tap you on the head, I want you to pull on it."

"How hard?"

He stared over her head in exasperation. "Like you're turning on a light."

"Won't this hurt?"

"Let's try it and see."

After a while he told her she could stop.

"It's like playing with a wet rubber wienie," she complained. Nothing novel about this situation except the string. "Can I pull on it anyway?"

She did and he went "Toot toot."

Then Reese unzipped the gym bag and showed her huge handfuls of loaded vials.

"Let the party begin," she proclaimed.

Later (whatever that meant in regard to a point lost among spewing nebulae of time), he explained the string was a device to remind him of the thisness of the body. People were no longer cognizant of the actualities of the flesh. And if a person, be he male or be he female, entertained an insufficiently active symbiosis with the body's vitals, then that body was susceptible to occupation by others. Government others. Simple tools like string and various controlled substances were necessary then to keep open crucial channels with your biological base.

"Yes," she said. "That's what I believe."

His face was developing new highlights. Yes, she was seeing clearly now, experiencing things as they were. "You have cute ears," she said.

His arm was reaching for her, every hair a distinct individual specially inserted in bright skin for her viewing pleasure.

She fell for him once because, searching the innocence of his face, she witnessed the materialization of his third eye in the properly centered position of his forehead and she was bewitched. This was the eye that would master her. They met at the Art Institute and forty minutes later he was banging her in an elevator deliberately stalled between floors (Greek and Impressionism). He liked art and the museum was a good, safe place for dealing. He liked football and American history and dope. His features looked great posed against the Rembrandts. So they screwed each other for a while and then they screwed other people. His freckled skin like cinnamon flakes floating in milk in the somnolent light of late afternoon on Mill Street, up under the unpainted eaves in the sagging bed, where she began calling in sick until the day the hospital called her. By then, bored with school, Reese was drifting carelessly streetward, Latisha trailing after. She dealt out of his car from a corner near the library to her own select clientele of friends or friends of friends or strangers who claimed to be acquaintances of onetime friends. His paranoia worsened, he slept with a Smith & Wesson in his hand; one night, defending him from a dream assault, it went off, missing by inches her equally addled head and tearing an unplasterable hole in both wall and relationship. She walked away. She lived with guys. She did what she had to do. She noticed suspicious sores on her body. She worried about AIDS, off and on. The sores came and went. Mister CD was one of the better specimens of contemporary guyhood.

Now here was Reese again, wanting her back. He was so paranoid. He begged her. She wouldn't go. He said his lines. She said her lines. Like that. Back and forth. He was so paranoid.

After he was gone, she wasn't sure that anyone had been in the house with her tonight. Over the last year she had gotten accustomed to perpetual uncertainty, to life in this neo-"soft" world where edges were malleable and indistinct, a uniform layer of concern draped like a sheet over the great and the trivial alike. She appreciated this view; most things didn't seem to matter much.

A good soldier, at the hour of her watch, she mounted the parapet and she paced, wall to wall, the narrow bedroom path cleared of floor debris, the closet sentinel. I am alive. I am a person. I am real. My name is Latisha Charlemagne. My name is Latisha Charlemagne. Real. Off in the night somewhere the inexplicable hum of giant machinery. She clutched at her shoulders, the sudden spasms, shivering in the August heat. When Leech Woman felt this bad, she killed another young man, injected the juice of his pituitary. Behind the door she discovered an old sweater (not hers), riddled with cigarette burns, separating at the seams, and as she put it on, mind wandering off to play by itself for a minute or two, her fingers abruptly recoiled in horror from the unexpected sensation of slipping into a garment of human skin (her own) buttoned inside out.

When she was little she knew she was never going to die. This was a fact as insistent, as palpable, as true, as the rain in her face, the light in the trees, and sometimes even now, years distant from the innocence that made revelation possible, she was able to find her way back to the sheltering bole of that knowledge. It wasn't a trip that happened often, no predicting where or how it might occur, but when the right path opened before her, happiness ran up wagging its tail to guide her and remind her yet again: everything she knew was wrong. Why had she gone into nursing? She hated the sick. Why had she hooked up with Mister CD? He was fat, ugly, and mean. Why did she fuck people like Reese? She'd heard he had AIDS. Why had she mailed a Xmas card of furiously scrawled obscenities to her parents? They didn't know anything, either. Why was her life going up in smoke? When she was a little girl, she wanted to run away with the carnival.

She rolled over and Mister CD, pasty, sweaty, returned from the dead, was propped in the doorway, glaring at her. He did not look good. "What's that?" he demanded.

"Huh?"

"Say what you were saying again."

"What're you doing?" She wasn't totally positive it was him.

"What do you mean, what am I doing? What are you doing?"

She rubbed at the side of her face with the heel of her palm. "I didn't hear you come in."