What We Are (13 page)

“Real communal place,” I say.

“I'll show you communal,” she purrs.

I'm zoning again, tripping out on the strange place that is twenty-first-century America, identical cardboard domiciles on a private hill, when she hits a button on her steering wheel. Before us a countour of blackness grows from the ground up, ending in a black rectangle the size of a carport. We pull into the blackness itself, haven't even killed the engine before the automatic door is closing on the sunlight and the sheen of the houses in the rearview mirror.

So we're in the box. I know what's next: I'm in
her
box. We fornicate on the front seat of the car in the empty garage, thousands of blind amenable eyes we'll never see surrounding us.

I'
M IN THE HOUSE
for thirteen days, floating. Everything's so damned clean you wanna buy a four-legged pet to shit in the middle of the living room, just to mix things up a bit. You can't help but think of all the filthy images in your head—a greasy restaurant alleyway between Ginza and Gombei in Japantown, an issue of
Penthouse
magazine—almost with pride. Somehow this kind of sanctity seems ignoble. Every corner of the house is cool: wisps of refrigerated air tickle your feet, slide along the back of your neck like the first touch in a movie theater, swirl above your head. There's not a mite or a flea in sight. You can lie down on the couch, the rug, on the sparkling kitchen floor; you can lie down anywhere you want. You can eat off a plate, the floor, same difference. There are entertainment centers in the living room, on the patio, upstairs in La Dulce's room, hulking speakers on polished oak, miniature honor bars, everything designed to keep you inside the house forever.

Each day I wake in midmorning and she's gone off on some secret rendezvous on the other side of the Bay. She leaves me Odwalla tangerine juice and cold but cooked blueberry pancakes for breakfast, stationary notes with her four-name name in a fancy header that
say, insensibly,
The muse wants some dynamo, baby
, or,
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
, a lipstick kiss as signature. Almost two weeks I give her nothing. I can't write a line of anything in this fluff. I've the house to myself, but most of my time is spent curling up in some hidden corner of the couch, sleeping in the buff for hours, or interviewing myself—Charlie Rose, Brian Lamb—on current political issues.

La Dulce is a woman of habit. When she's about to go to wherever she goes, she wants it. When she gets back from wherever she's been, she wants it. And it's always in the garage. I readily provide it, parcel it out with booty slaps and nasty lingo and slow draw. I'm like a steady server in a soup line. She loves it, she nibbles on my ear, shreds the skin of my back with her cheesy dragon nails. All the in-between time, we're platonic, though that doesn't mean we're quiet or in accordance. It just means we don't fuck. And that we're anywhere except in the garage. I have no clue what I'm doing here, though that's hardly a new state of mind.

Today I lose all the threads except for my
ie lavalava
, which La Dulce calls my Samoan skirt. She's almost home so I wash a few dishes, empty a trash can in the living room. I stretch out in what I imagine to be a version of the lotus position, wind down, and think of myself as a delicate flower in the breeze. The pads of my feet don't even come close to touching when I hear, “I want you to die, bitch!”

I pop up, jump to my feet. Don't know why—
I do know why:
If all the windows and doors are closed, if the garage is shut, if La Dulce is gone, someone else is in the fucking house! I walk toward the vast hall on the east end of the estate, realizing that there's a section I seem to have forgotten about. I walked through it the first day and never returned. It's furnished lightly—a hutch with faux china lining the shelves, a framed photo of MLK in D.C.—with the same white short-fibered carpet crawling through it. There are three rooms, two with doors open. One is a weight room with a Sears
treadmill, dip/pull-up bars, and standing mirrors; the other a respectable library with an emphasis on black American authors. The place appears empty. That's why I haven't been down this way. I approach the third door, which is shut, and hear, “You whore! You goddamned whore!”

I put my ear to the door and don't hear any sound of struggling or argument: no one's being beaten. I do hear keys being struck, the kind of keys on a computer keyboard. Someone's playing video games or maybe answering e-mail? Should I wait for La Dulce to return? She never mentioned a boarder, a roommate, another body in this place. Finally, not out of concern, really, but out of the minimal curiosity that springs from boredom, I open the door.

It looks like a strategy room of the FBI. All three walls are enveloped in graphs and charts and facial photographs and partially and totally nude full-body photographs and women like my dead cousin in creepy positions, their ankles behind their ears, looking back at me over their shoulders, some with disturbing trepidation, some with disturbing bravado. Upon closer investigation, the graphs are body parts with a number next to it:
tits 8, pussy 7, ass 4, face 6, stomach 4, legs 8
. And then there's another number, the sum of the body parts:
37
.

There's a microwave in one corner, a hot plate atop it, at least thirty Mickey D's cheeseburgers on the corner of the desk, case upon case of Coca-Colas stacked as high as my shoulders. Top ramen packets, unopened, everywhere. An industrial-sized garbage can to my immediate right overflowing with empty cans and crumpled wrappers. The windows are shut, the blinds are closed, the rug is worn down in selective areas. The bed is not made, the sheets are yellowed. Musk. Stench. An opened door leads to the bathroom. There are cameras in each corner of the ceiling, hanging in midair like sleeping bats, the eye of each on the chair in the middle of the room where a young man sits, his back to me. He's slamming away on the keyboard
like a novelist trying to get the scene out, every last word. He still hasn't turned, and does not even stop to look up when I'm standing right behind him, my reflection on the screen. He's written one message:
BITCH. U R EVIL. DIE.

“Hey, man,” I say.

He doesn't say a word, punches
SEND
, starts drumming his fingers with one hand, reaches out with the other, grabs a Coke, eyes on the screen, mouths the lip, lifts it, doesn't get a drop. There's a reason: it's not open. I feel no inclination at all to tell him. It's hard to discern his cultural background from behind: He's in a v-neck T-shirt and Donald Duck boxers and the skin that I can see looks like it's never been outdoors. A little bell rings on the computer, the screen flashes, and a new message appears:
U R THE BITCH, BITCH. AND WHEN U DIE, I'LL JUST FIND ME ANOTHER BITCH. BYE-BYE, BITCH
. (smiley face).

“Oooohh, that's dirty,” he says.

He breaks open the Coke, which fizzles on the stuffy air, leans back, downs the drink, and tosses the can behind him. It lands in the general vicinity of the garbage can. He slams down on his keys, breathing hard during the task. The new message says:
BITCH, I'LL FIND ME
20
BY MIDNIGHT
2
NITE
: (20 smiley faces).

He hits
SEND
and I say, “Hey. Why don'tchu open some windows, man?”

He says nothing, glued to the screen, waiting.

“The world's burning up, man. The Middle East is in flames. War and death are at the doorstep.”

War?

Death?

He wouldn't know a thing about it. This is his war. This is his death. It's all in the brain: the unseen enemy, the cerebral whirlpool. Mind without culture.

Now he's chewing off his nails, spitting them out the side of his mouth as if they were seed shells at a ballpark. To the left of the
chair there's a little pile of assorted chunks of epidermis and discarded or regurgitated food. I bend over to get a closer look and find fingernails, skin, uprooted hair of the wiry pubic version, pieces of (I think, hope) ground beef, pickles.

The bell rings again, the screen flashes, and there she is, a rear view of her spread-open backside, and nothing else, plunged into the screen. Close up the shadows of black and gray are almost entities unto themselves, a daguerreotype jawline, wings of birds, midnight roads, all leading to or rising from the darkest region in the middle of the screen. At the bottom of her bottom the message reads:
TAKE A LAST LOOK, BITCH. HOPE 4 YUR SAKE YUR SAVE FILES AIN'T FULL. NEVER AGAIN
(a middle-finger 4ever).

He immediately pokes himself through the urine hole in his Donald Duck boxers and starts stroking his boot which, in its vast girth and longness, shouldn't belong to an infertile mutherfucker like this, and as it finally grows to full capacity, he reaches over to another Coke can, pops it, mid-stroke, and takes a shot. I feel like a perv in a bathroom stall glued to his black peephole. I look over my shoulder, as if La Dulce is about to walk in and shout, “Aha! I knew it, nigga, I knew it!” As if there's a cop with cuffs behind me, or Singh of the housing authority and the Goodwill badge, shaking his head sadly at this latest example of American decay.

I see instead Olde English lettering over the door, cut in a slab of lacquered oak, an assignment from junior high woodshop:
The Babe Lair
.

I turn back around and he's at full throb, pinching the base so that the meaty knob expands like a wild mushroom. He fingers a few keys on the board, still choking the blood of his boot, and I hear the dangling cameras above coming to life. Suddenly on the computer screen there are four aerial angles of the boot, so exact in image that you can see the purple veins running through it, and he reaches out
and hits
SAVE
, retucks the boot into his boxers, takes a sip of Coke, types in
SAME GOES FOR U, BITCH
(a middle finger 4 eternity plus 1)and hits
SEND
.

In the end, I heard tell, all the children will go insane.

From here on out, there's no going back. We're on a one-trek course to self-destruction. It's about the bile now, the fluid, the image. Make love? Romance? A bed in the tropics with vanilla silk sheets cloaked by fragrant petals of red roses? What's the point? The church was right:
Manus stuprare
, defilement of the hand, is the moral end of man. Of woman, too.

The Babe Lair? More like the Masturbation Station. The Embalmed Palm.

I don't know why, but I start to make vows of abstinence, of never touching another woman unless I've a heart-and-soul commitment, not only from her but of me. Let us spin back, my darling,
la mia ragazza bella
, against all those libertine hairballs on acid spinning their palms to the sky in the late sixties: true and total sexual liberty is a flopping fish choking on the oxygen. We're a decade away from permanent insulation, of never touching another body.

He's got his hard dick in a greasy hand again, a new erogenous zone on the screen, the chair on two legs, no real light anywhere to be seen.

I have a flash dream of stepping forward with gritted teeth and short breath, reaching out for a good grip on his light-brown locks of tangled hair, digging into the root, lifting his way-too-light ass off the chair. Half my torso and all his head on the screen, connected in cyberspace alas. Squirming now, his mouth in a bottomless concave of horror. He's returning to a flaccid state, and his scrunched-up eyebrows look like the crankster in the Jack-in-the-Crack but worse, as in:
The real world is so mean on the senses, isn't it?

He doesn't turn around. I'm not here.

I walk out of the room, cross the flawless steam-cleaned rug of this strange
domitae naturae
. Open the door connecting the kitchen to the empty box of the garage and unlock and peek out of it as if there were goblins and fairies on the other side, and when the hot light hits my eyes and La Dulce pulls into the space, I step out blindly. The garage door is already shutting, the assembly-line hum and growing darkness womblike, and I lean into the open window on the driver's side of the car.

“There's someone living in your house.”

She turns over and shows me her naked ass, looks back over her shoulder. Beatrice La Dulce Shaliqua Schneck's been driving around in the buff, big shock.

“Wanna play, Daddy?”

“No.”

She lifts one leg over her head, almost kicking out the windshield, and says, “Are you sure, baby?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I'm sure.”

“You sure as shit,” she says, suddenly covering herself as if I've walked in on her in the little girls room.

“That's sure enough for me,” I say, thinking,
Beyotch
.

“Well,” she says, fumbling with and sliding into a leopard-print g, “go ahead.”

“Who's that freak down there?”

“Where?”

“Downstairs.”

“That's my son.”

“So that's him?”

“Yeah.”

“He don't look Haitian to me,” I say.

“He ain't. Willie African-American.”

Here we go. Is he Libyan or Sudanese or Zulu or Pygmy or Moroccan? Does he speak Kru or Somali or Dinca or Afrikaans?
African-American? What a joke on our human cargo history. Everything is sensitively washed away—the residual guilt, the ancient suffering—by the encapsulation of an entire continent into one catch-all PC term. Same thing with our sweeping up the five hundred tribes into Native American. I prefer the term Indian: at least there the error of arrival is elucidated for debate.

I say, “Is he an Egyptian or what? King Tut's kid?”

“No, fool. He Willie. That's it.”

I'm suddenly encouraged by a possible display of tact: maybe we fuck only in the garage because her son shouldn't see or hear that kind of behavior. Right? That's nice and retro. Maybe even a little motherly, a rarity for La Dulce.