Postcards from a Dead Girl (7 page)

Barcelona is brighter than I imagined. So much sun, it's almost overwhelming. The light is everywhere: it showers down from an impossibly blue sky, reflects off every building, glistens off every body. It slices up through the cracks in the sidewalks, fills up every corner, erases every shadow.

I heard about a disease people get from vacationing in places so beautiful they are psychologically incapable of handling it. Their intimate contact with pure unadulterated beauty makes them come apart at the seams. This may be such a place. I understand now why Zoe wrote “wish you were here.” It's a bit unsettling, being alone in this sunny paradise. Maybe I'm just getting tired from all my travels—jet lag, and all that.

It takes me a while to get through the tight streets. There is so much brick and there are so many churches. I don't want to ask anyone if they speak English because I feel ridiculous asking
“Habla inglés?”
like I'm back in eighth-grade Spanish class and this is the magic phrase dumb Americans say because they're too good to learn a second language.

When I arrive at the Oficia del Postal, I am awestruck. This can't be the post office. A massive cathedral-like structure towers
above me, with skyward spires and textures of an impossible pattern. It hurts to look at, it's so beautiful. I realize I've forgotten my sunglasses. I don't have a hat and I can't squint any harder. People pass me by and nobody speaks English. It's all gibberish. This whole place is noise and light and beauty. I decide to try the post office another time, when I'm better rested.

In the hotel gift shop, I look for some ibuprofen. There are shirts and hats and sunglasses and gum. There are shot glasses and candy and magazines. There is no ibuprofen. But there are postcards. Dozens of them, lining the shelves. I search through them and find an exact match to my Barcelona card. Adjacent to the postcards is a block of wood with a red pen attached to it by a string. The wood has writing all over it, scribbling from countless customers who used it as an ink tester. Zoe could have purchased her postcard right here and used this exact pen. I feel a surge of adrenaline with this thought, anxious about the close proximity of her presence.

I take the stairs back up to my room, jumping two at a time, and I think the effort forces too much blood to my head. My sunshine headache is evolving to something more substantial. I rarely get headaches, and this one is killing me. I want to call Natalie and tell her to take care of Zero in case I don't come back as planned. No way am I getting on a plane feeling like this. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic. Maybe I want to call Natalie just to hear somebody speak English.

I turn on the television for some distraction. I flip through the channels and John the TV psychic is not on any of them, thank God. The soap operas are plentiful, though, and they're all doing that manic back-and-forth face-searching. I wonder where they learned this style of acting. I turn the TV off, lie back in bed, and rub at my forehead. I think of Dr. Singh, how I still
haven't heard back from him on the CAT-scan results, and how strange that day was.

 

“You know,” the CAT-scan operator started to say that day, then let his words float unfinished in the room. I stood there in my little green gown, waiting for him to complete his out-loud thoughts. He was a tall, wiry guy with veiny forearms, probably younger than me, but he spoke as if he were the chief of surgery.
MIKE
, his name tag said in black plastic letters. “Paul McCartney helped pay for these machines to be made into mobile truck units,” Mike said. “You're getting scanned with a little help from the Beatles.” He grinned at his pun.

“I bet they're a bitch down the long and winding roads,” I quipped.

Mike's face went blank.

I felt bad that he was trying to put me at ease. It meant he had compassion, and I was a big liar going to get scanned. It wasn't really a lie; I just wasn't meeting with the right person, maybe. I was wondering if an exorcist might be the more appropriate choice, but Paul McCartney probably didn't fund any mobile exorcism units.

“Hey,” I offered, “did you know if you play one of the Beatles songs backward, it says ‘Paul is dead'?”

MIKE
strapped me onto the ice-cold gurney. “I'm not really a fan, actually,” he said, slid up the safety rails, and rolled me into the belly of the giant humming machine. “It'll be over soon.”

 

The curtains on my hotel room windows are maroon and delightfully thick, like the ones in movie theaters. I pull them closed and
shut off all the lights. I push the bed up against one wall and surround myself with blankets and pillows. It's not the same as the nest I used to share with Zoe, but it serves its purpose as I wait for my headache to melt away.

I sleep for what must be several hours. When I wake, the daytime no longer creeps in around the edges of the curtains, which tangibly decreases the pain in my head. But my headache is replaced by a numbing boredom. With only four television channels to surf, I quickly cycle through my choices and realize it's time to get outside.

I open my “See Sexy Spain” vacation guide and study the photos: beaches populated with alluring models—uninterested women with dark tans, confident in their tinted eyewear; deeply tanned men with wraparound sunglasses, feigning indifference. Everyone is so cool, so apathetic. I need something to wake me up. I flip through more pages and find the
discotheque
section. I can't read most of the writing, but there are a lot of exclamation points and that looks exciting. According to one ad, a popular club is right up the street: Club de Cuerpo. I imagine Zoe might be drawn to such a place—an entire building filled with new, alluring people. Her interest in other cultures always showed itself for several days after we'd watch a foreign film. She'd talk about
discotheques
and
boulangeries
, stressing the correct foreign pronunciation to make those words stand out like works of audible art—as if their unique sounds were reason enough to visit faraway lands. I guess I need to see what all the noise is about.

My vision and hearing are officially gone. All I can sense is the thumping. A giant mass of soap bubbles has washed over me and most of the dance floor, like a horror-movie fog. The pulse is maddening, a physical presence infusing my internal organs. My hair vibrates. My eyes burn. Wild women whoop and swing their hair around and grind on other women.

It's a wild scene, but already I feel sick. Sick of this club, with all its strobe flashes and percussion bombs; sick of bright lights and brighter drinks—orange and lime-green concoctions created to poison the patrons; sick of the day and the night, the smell of suntan oil, the loud cooing of women trying so hard to appear like women who are having so much fun. Sick of myself and this hopeless journey.

My mouth waters, so I lean forward. I think: nobody will notice if I vomit. The soap machines will wash it all away. This disco is like a human carwash, but it is hot and miserable, not soothing at all. Two fun-filled coconut-oil girls make a Sid sandwich, polishing me with their bronze, bikini-clad buttocks. It all might be very exciting if the motion would cease and my eyes would stop burning and the pounding bass would quit shaking my stomach.
I manage to slip through the crowd and squirm safely to a drier part of the club. I climb up two flights of stairs and perch on a dark balcony, high above the light systems and bubble machines.

From this view, Club de Cuerpo lives up to its name—not due to its beautiful bodies but because the club itself functions like a body. The entrance is the mouth, the dance floor the heart, the bars the stomach, the soap suds the liver, and the back alleyway the anus. The patrons are mere cells who move to the break-beat rhythm of DJ Brain, although not much of one considering the monophonic pulsing. So this must put me in the appendix, the organ which seems to have no purpose. Much better. Of course, the appendix is also known for rupturing suddenly and causing extreme pain and death, but at least my shirt's not vibrating.

I scan the crowd for faces, but I don't see Zoe or anyone even closely resembling her. I wonder if that's why she was initially attracted to this city. I wonder if she had as much fun as I'm having, or if she traveled to this exotic locale just so she could send a postcard.

Two twenty-minute super-song mixes later, it's time for me to leave. I descend to the main floor, where I see a security guy. At least someone's in charge. But this guy's not directing traffic; he's chatting up a model.

A drunk man by the front door shouts at a hulking bouncer. A fight breaks out. Hands push. Fists fly. A barstool catches air and an elbow jabs a fire alarm. The sprinkler system showers down cold, stale rain, and all
cuerpos
instinctively race for the closest exit. An entire body's contents flush out, regurgitated back onto the flashy streets of Spain, and me with them.

I am soaked, but no longer soapy. I walk across the street to separate myself from the crowd and observe the rest of the wet
clubbers as they line the sidewalk. The women pull their long black hair back to squeeze out the water. The men peel off their shirts and tuck them in the backs of their pants. People scream and laugh. The party never stops.

One of the girls breaks away from the pack and walks straight toward me. She's peculiar with her short blond hair. She has a cigarette in one hand, held awkwardly above her head to stop the water from streaming down her arm. Her other hand pulls her tight skirt down across tight thighs. Her heels click loudly on the street as she approaches. It's like watching a movie, until she speaks directly to me. Her words sound like Spanish or Portuguese. She rolls her eyes, looks back at her girlfriends, then says something again, this time in a different language, something harsher. Now she sounds Swedish, or maybe she only looks Swedish. I glance at her girlfriends. They wave. One of them blows me a kiss.

“Sorry,” I say to the girl, “I don't understand. Do you speak English?”

“Do you have a letter?” the girl asks.

I raise my eyebrows. What does she know about a letter?

She laughs, puckers her lips, wrinkles her nose at me. “A letter? Do you have a letter?” She holds up her other hand and makes a gesture like she wants to thumb-wrestle me. Bizarre.

“Sorry,” she says. “My English is no good. I am from Norvay. Do you know Norvegian?” She laughs as if she can guess the answer. Her friends blow me more kisses between their index and middle fingers. The Norwegian girl holds up her cigarette in front of her face. “I need a letter,” she says, and loses her balance a little but catches herself. “Fire,” she says.

“Oh,” I say loud and slow, “a lighter!”

She points at me. Her friends cheer.

“Sorry, I don't smoke.” I give her my best eighth-grade Spanish. “
No fumar. Lo siento
.” I hold my palms up, and shrug.

She frowns in mock despair, then leans in toward me. “You are cute guy,” she says, and kisses my cheek. She reaches out to touch my chin, gives it a gentle push, and says,
“Eso es desafortunado porque pienso te amo.”

“I don't speak Norwegian,” I say, which is unfortunate.

She winks, spins around toward her friends, and clicks away.

Rotating the channels on my hotel television allows me to watch the pictures without watching them. I can stare bleary-eyed through the box of light while still gleaning some content. It's a nice break from the booming noise of the club, but my unfocused eyes are catching some weird stuff.

A commercial for Wild Chase Videos plays helicopter footage of cars smashing on the highway and flying off bridges. A World News channel displays an animation of space junk cluttering the stratosphere, crashing into satellites, hurling burned chunks of metal back toward the earth. The channels seem to have increased in number. A dog show has a woman sprinting alongside her purebred, the animal looking less than thrilled to be there. I swear the dog is somehow pleading for help, and when I snap my eyes back into focus, another commercial takes over the screen, advertising a deep-tanning lotion that makes you extra sexy.

I push the off button. The picture instantly reduces to a small bright square and hovers there for a moment, like it doesn't want to leave. I realize I've been at the edge of my seat for the past hour, my body rigid with engagement, regardless of my mental
detachment. I roll my shoulders to loosen up. The little box of light dims.

I stand up to stretch, walk around the room a few times. I hear dogs barking at one another outside, or maybe they're barking at the moon.

I've noticed there are a large number of dogs running free in Spain, roaming the neighborhoods, weaving in and out of traffic. My late-night mind starts in with late-night thoughts: I wonder who picks up the animal carcasses left on the streets, if it's a job the police do in the earliest hours of the morning to avoid onlookers. I wonder then who might pick up human carcasses, and how those people go home at night and manage to forget what they've seen when they tuck their children into bed, or make love to their wives before sleeping soundly. And do they sleep soundly? Or do they stay awake all night with the television on mute, half-watching blurry images of cars and satellites and dog shows, ruminating about morbid curiosities?

“All right, tiger,” I say out loud, cutting off the stream of ominous thoughts, “time for night-night. Somebody's wiped out from too much excitement.”

I go to the bathroom and run the shower, get back in bed, and listen to the white noise. My tired body falls unconscious almost immediately. I dream of car washes, giant humming tombs, pink foam sluicing down my windshield, gentle electric eyes blinking hello, and me, surfing on a strong, steady wave in the ocean of Deep Blue Bliss. Zoe memorizes my back with her fingertips and asks me what I would do if she were dead. I roll over to tell her what I always tell her, but her skin has turned to slate, she's cold to the touch. Her gray eyes stare lifelessly back at me. “Ning maa,” she coos, and smiles.