Numb (21 page)

“Normal?” I put down my wineglass and stood. “You mean, normal like you? With a girlfriend who's got a self-destructive streak and enjoys tormenting former lovers? That kind of normal? Why don't you tell me how you feel knowing that she held forks stuck in my back while she screamed beneath me?”

Emilia shouted at me, “Hey, listen, he's only interested in your relationship to Mal, not—”

“Why?” I yelled. I stood in the middle of the room, my fists tight at my sides, my temples throbbing. Other conversations in the room died as my voice rose. “Why the fuck do you care about him?”

Ray and Emilia shared another private look. No smiles
this time, no giggles. Ray's eyes pleaded with Emilia and she turned away and quietly said, “I thought he knew.”

“Knew what?” I startled myself with the command in my voice.

Emilia leaned back. She looked thin again. Around her the light fixtures dimmed from some fluctuation in the lines; the air conditioner's hum dipped a half step for a moment or two. Shadows cut her face back to its old self. Voice as iced as she could muster, she said, “Ray is trying to get the role of Mal in the movie.”

Vile words fell from my lips and a woman behind me gasped. I stepped away from fingers that had begun to pull at my shirt buttons, looked down and discovered that the assaulting fingers were my own. I realized what they were up to and looked to see what my words might have done to Emilia. She didn't respond, but Ray blushed. I lowered my shirt and turned my back to Ray.

“I want to show you something, Ray. Does she ever talk about these? These scars, the ones near my waist and the middle of my back. Some are her fingernails, some are pins. Or forks. There's a can opener scar near the small of my back. She used to do this to me while we screwed. Does she do this to you? She got so she couldn't or, more likely, wouldn't do it without cutting as foreplay.”

They stood silent, silent as the crowd behind me. The bulbs buzzed at the warm air around us, but I felt cool, my shirt, still tucked in, now hanging at my waist. Emilia,
reddened by the lights or anger, seethed, unable to look up from the floor in front of her. Ray looked everywhere but at her. Michael called to me. I ignored him.

I pulled my shirt back on. “I wanted to show you that because it's something Mal knew about. He didn't understand it, but he knew about it. He knew that she tried to peel skin off me while we had sex, and he wondered why I broke the heart of an amazing woman just so I could fool around with Emilia. Mal liked this other woman, my girlfriend Hiko, and he didn't get why I did what I did, but he was my friend and he stood by me while I made my mistakes.”

I found my glass of wine and gulped it down. I felt the piece of cork catch at the back of my throat and smiled. “I stood by Mal as he made his mistakes too. Then he became afflicted with death, and Emilia left me for California to help some guy Mal would have hated get into the movies. In fact, I think Mal would have kicked you in the nuts just to see how you'd react.”

Ray stiffened to his full height. Easily half a foot taller than me, forty pounds heavier, and in incredible shape. One hand was wrapped around his wineglass, the other whitened to a fist. All I could think was how he would have been awful casting for the part of Mal. We stared at each other and my entire body tensed up, just like it had in Caesar's cage.

My yelling was over. My voice hushed, I said, “Ray, I can't feel pain. So who do you think wins this fight? You
with your big muscles, or me with my affliction and a supreme need to work off my hatred of you and Emilia?”

Emilia's voice shook as she told Ray to calm down.

I walked away but could hear Ray say to Emilia, “You said that tape was a publicity stunt.”

Steven and Michael chased me to the door but I beat them to it and didn't stop when they called me from it. I looked over my shoulder and saw the two of them crowded in the doorway with other faces behind them, like a logjam collected at the exit of the well-lit house. They called, and I think Steven shook a fist in my direction, or he waved goodbye. Either way, I walked to the street and turned the nearest corner, keeping my hand ready to flag down the next car as I gave a quick prayer it would be a cab.

AS SOON AS
my plane landed I returned to Hiko's brownstone. I took a taxi from the airport, then sat in it until the meter added an extra two hundred dollars to the tab. For the first thirty minutes we sat there the cabbie complained I was wasting his time. He shut up when I handed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him that was just the tip, if only I could sit a bit longer. When I was ready, I handed him another wad of bills and got out of the cab. Then I stood near a fire hydrant for another half hour.

It was past midnight. Hiko wasn't home; her windows were dark. If she'd been home the windows would have been bright, needlessly illuminated. I imagined her moving through the building, turning on all the lights as she
went, allowing them to burn all night. I imagined she wanted to spite her blindness.

Neighboring buildings were mostly dark. A random window occasionally cast white light or the blue-gray flashes of a television screen. A car drove by, followed by a long silence and then another car. No one knew why I was waiting outside the building. No one cared.

I climbed the front steps and reached for the extra key she kept hidden under a window box on a sill near the top step. It was gone. I rechecked, hoping that I had missed it. I hadn't.

I spent ten minutes discovering that picking a lock with a credit card is much harder than in the movies. I mangled a card learning this. I had no idea how to do it anyway. Maybe it only works on a certain kind of lock. My sole victory came while pushing at the lock with my card—the door wasn't closed well to begin with and swung open. My luck ended with the outer door. The inner was locked with a deadbolt.

I closed the outer door and sat on the floor, my back against the wall, and watched the inner door, my bag at my side. I tapped my foot against the inner door and listened to the glass pane of its upper half rattle. I hated what I was about to do. I counted to one hundred, perhaps to give Hiko a chance to get home, perhaps out of fear, and then pulled my hammer from my bag. Airport security in Los Angeles had forced me to check it. The address label and airline sticker hung from the handle.
I held the hammer with both hands and waited for the rumble of the bus that came down the street regularly during the night. It had passed twice since I'd been there and was due soon. At last I heard it laboring toward me. I stood, pulled a T-shirt from my bag, and held it over the window with one hand. As the bus passed, the rumble at its loudest, I brought the hammer around. I put as much force as possible into that shot.

Every time I drove a nail into my skin I had the slightest hesitation, a split second's pulling back, as if to spare myself some pain. I always attributed it to natural instinct, an innate survival code that I couldn't erase. I noticed that same hesitation as the hammer swung through my shirt, shattering the glass window. I noticed the slightest of pauses in my hand, as if saving myself from some sort of pain. Even with that hesitation I'd never hit anything so hard. I'd never even used the hammer on anything but nails aimed at my own skin.

I broke into Hiko's home.

The glass shattered and fell in large, irregular shapes to the floor on both sides of the door. For only a second a sharp, sudden attack of noise enveloped me as the hammer punched through and the glass crashed down, but almost as suddenly the noise stopped. I heard the bus cruising down the street, then nothing but my breath. I reached through the open window and twisted the lock. I entered Hiko's home, crushed glass beneath my feet. In the stucco pattern of the wall I found the light
switch. I felt seashells under my wrist as I pushed the switch and the light came on. I wondered if I had ever turned the lights on before. I went through the building repeating this improvement. I turned on every light in every room. I turned on the stereo, and very low Nina Simone drained out. Hiko had even replaced the television I'd owned and then destroyed. I turned it on, with the sound off. Across the screen clung a thin protective plastic film. It was clear and didn't affect the image on the set, but I worked at the corner and caught hold of an edge and peeled it away. It felt as though I was removing the Braille pages I'd taped onto my set, even though it was plastic, not paper, and clearly nothing like the pages I'd cut from Hiko's book. With each light and the stereo and the television, I felt something I'd carried a long time fall from me, and I felt the room open up. I could see it, finally. It was nothing like I remembered. It was warmer, friendlier. Sometimes it's what we carry inside us, I realized, that gives a room its ambiance. It's not the room itself. It's us.

I went to the kitchen and opened all the cupboards. My hand ran along the shelves, feeling the Braille labels under the cans of beans, corn, peas, as my brain tried desperately to memorize their arrangement, to make sense of the small bumps of the labels, to make sense of the random qualities that were organized by Hiko. I did this with a desperation I couldn't fathom. All the cans and boxes were neatly spaced, nicely ordered, but there
remained a mystery in why rice sat next to the canned goods, and cereal with the flour and pasta. How could I make sense without Hiko there to guide me through it? She lived through preparation; my hotel life was death by clean towels. I wanted to understand her life so I could help replicate it in myself, copy it, can by can, box by box. I wanted to help prepare something, build something.

I climbed the stairs. The lights in her gallery space came on slowly, and mainly illuminated only the pieces, not the room as a whole. Her personal collection of casts and portraits in stark white glowed under the spotlight halogen bulbs. The heat from each radiated at specific intervals and I realized that was how she knew her place in the room. She counted the gaps between the warmth of the bulbs and the cool spaces in between. I walked past the first ones near the doorway, anxious to get to my own, to find the private face that Hiko had found in me and which terrified me with its infinitely fine spider-webbing of cracks over the surface. I'd been horrified by its accuracy. Now I craved it.

The spot where my portrait had been held something else. Instead of the plain white sculpture I found the horrible, bloody scab portrait, the one that included bits of glass and shards of metal. Hiko had replaced the one that promised what I hoped I could be with what I feared I was. This was the gallery where she kept those works just for her, and I no longer resided there in the way I could have. The harsh, angry image did. Clearly, I'd
shattered the other image of myself by my selfish actions, and she'd likely shattered the sculpture because of it.

I left the gallery. In her bedroom I turned on the bedside light. The window ahead reflected me like a mirror. I did not know the person who looked back at me. What faced me exuded disappointment. I saw someone selfish and stupid and hurtful, someone wallowing in ignorant innocence. I saw a man who let a friend die. I saw a man who exchanged trust for lust. I had nothing to show for anything: time, people, places. Nothing I'd done mattered to me or anyone else, and I'd missed so many opportunities for something more. The window reflected the repercussions of that. A worn-out, scarred, and scared man. I didn't know if Hiko would come home tonight, or if I'd ever see her, but I hoped that I could at least say I was sorry, say it in a way that was meaningful and not just the knee-jerk instinct that had come out of me before in so many ways. I didn't expect forgiveness, but I hoped that she would at least let me say the words.

I sat on the bed and looked at myself in the window. The clock chimed and I turned to look at it. By the time it struck its third and final chime, I had tears in my eyes. Beside the clock sat the plaster cast of my face. Without Hiko there I couldn't ask why she had it by her side of the bed. Without her there the closest I could get to her was the mask. It may have been my face, but it was made up of her. I think that's why I was so affected by it. It looked like me, but it felt like her.

I stepped to the table and reached out for the mask. Drops of blood fell onto the face, streaking along the eyes and nose. That's when I saw the glass in my arm. A beautifully narrow three-inch triangle of glass rose from my inner forearm like a shark's fin. Blood leaked, flowed along the glass, and with a steady drip fell to the floor. Fresh spots of blood at my feet, with a few back to where I had sat on the bed. Bloody handprints and streaked stains littered the bedspread. Back at the doorway drops of blood dotted the floor. They connected all the places I'd been. Some areas were tightly clustered with blood and other parts of the hallways and stairs had long gaps between splatters, making me think of constellations. The light switch was painted with bloody fingerprints and trails of blood fell along the wall beneath.

My hand still hung above the white plaster face. The chalk color turned red with blood that continued to fall from the glass. My blood dotted the mask, pooled and ran from the nose and eyes and streaked down the cheeks toward the base. Hiko had once asked me if I had bloodied her artwork and I had lied. Not anymore, I realized.

I left the room without touching the mask, the one thing I'd come to find, and I followed the drops of blood I'd left throughout the house. Again and again I found bloody handprints on walls and door frames, small clusters showing pauses. The hardwood floor's pattern sometimes hid the spots, sometimes showed it off. I looked for
something other than just the recent blood, more drops underneath these fresh ones to show that I'd been in this house before, that I'd lived there. Underneath the blood, or maybe deeper in the wood there had to be some imprint I'd left behind, and not just here but out the door and down the street. Deeper in the ground or in the air surrounding those places I'd lived, where I'd performed or simply stood as I talked with Mal or Hiko or even Emilia or Darla, there had to be something of me there, something that would remain. I walked down the steps and saw only my newest bloodstains. I kept looking, and knew that I would probably never stop looking deeper, and deeper, for some sign of me.

At the front door gathered voices and flashing blue and red lights. A police car sat at the curb, Hiko beside it. One of two policemen consoled her, the other drew his gun when I emerged from her home. I stopped and raised my hands above my head.

I called out to Hiko, “It's me, Hiko.” Her head snapped toward me. Her black glasses reflected the blue and red strobes of the car lights. She said something too soft for me to hear. The larger of the two policemen tried to pull her away from the building but she turned on him and said something else. Voices squawked from the police car radio. I kept my hands up. I raised them higher.

By the time Hiko explained that she knew me and would not press charges, the cops had noticed my cut. The glass kept getting caught on my clothes as my arm
moved, and it alternately pulled partway out or pushed back in and I bled worse as a result.

The officers spoke to one another about my cut, and one of them suggested getting out their first-aid kit.

To the air between the cops Hiko said, “You have to take us to the hospital.”

“We'll call you an ambulance, miss,” said the smaller officer. The larger gave him a sharp look, then told us to get into the back of the car. From the trunk he pulled a med kit and loosely wrapped my arm.

“Does it hurt much?” he asked. I smiled and said that it did not and Hiko started to laugh. I knew she could hear my smile when I talked. I half believed she could hear it even when I didn't.

The police drove us up Seventh Avenue and headed toward Methodist Hospital. I watched Hiko, her head tilted to the side as if staring at the cop in front of her. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I wanted to apologize. For everything.”

“You already did that.”

“Did I?”

She didn't answer. I had, of course, or I had but hadn't meant it, or meant it but didn't know what I meant. My head began to swim.

The bandage around my arm turned red as it soaked up more blood. There were dark splatters across my lap and the seat. “I've done so many dumb—”

“You broke into my home to say sorry?”

“I couldn't wait for you to be home.”

She laughed. “That doesn't make any sense.” She stopped laughing suddenly. We were testing each other, feeling our way along the edges, trying to figure out the shape of what we were.

“My God, Hiko. I'm so sorry.”

She didn't move, only held her hands on her lap and faced the back of the car seat ahead of her as the two policemen pretended not to listen.

We pulled up to the emergency room entrance. Hiko couldn't see, yet she insisted I lean on her for support. We stepped through the fluorescent, buzzing entrance. A room full of bored, ill, or crying visitors greeted us. A group of four men and two women, all in black turtleneck sweaters and jeans, stood around a woman alternating between tears and laughter. Their expressions rotated between support, concern, and disinterest. Two men stared at each other from across the waiting room, both with cell phones to their ears, possibly talking to each other. Around the island desk in the middle hovered three staff people in white coats, name tags perched on their lapels. The oldest of them, a woman with gray dreadlocks tightly tied at the back of her head, smiled as we approached and asked me to fill out paperwork. Somehow I skipped ahead of everyone else in the waiting room because a male orderly arrived shortly and ushered me to an exam room. He opened the door and we discovered a man in green scrubs on his hands and knees,
wiping the floor with a wad of paper towels. The orderly turned to me with a confused grin.

“Lost control of a water bottle,” the man wiping the floor said. He blushed a bit. The orderly left us there, shaking his head. I was unsure whether we should follow him or not. The man on the floor cleared water I couldn't really see and Hiko stood next to me, holding the door frame, her hand on my elbow.