Sex

by Francine Pascal

  Yep. That’s what she had thought. You idiot, Gaia. You unadulterated idiot.

  She’d finally found Gen. Not another thug with a knife to Gaia’s throat. Gen with a knife to Gaia’s throat.

  “Hey, buddy,” Gen whispered in her ear. Casper was nearly falling down laughing at this point.

  “Gen, what are you doing?” Gaia asked. As if she didn’t already know. She kept her head as still as possible since Gen had the knife nearly slicing into her throat.

  “What am I doing?” Gen asked. “I’m robbing your ass, you idiot. What does it look like I’m doing?” She turned to Casper. “I told you she wasn’t that smart,” she said with a laugh.

  Yeah. That’s what she thought she was doing. Gaia closed her eyes in the darkest kind of humiliation. The reality of the situation was very slowly beginning to seep from her pores, through her brain, and finally, most painfully, into her heart, where she’d found it the hardest to accept this despicable truth.

  She’d made a mistake. She’d made a terrible, terrible, idiotic, stupid mistake.

  “Oh, what’s the matter?” Gen asked with mock concern. “Did someone ruin your little do-gooder project for the week? You poor little thing. Now you won’t have your drug-addict charity case for show-and-tell tomorrow.”

  Gaia didn’t even bother responding. There was no point in adding to her humiliation.

  “Yeah,” Gen went on, “here’s your news flash, Kung Fu Barbie: I’m not your poor little dead rich girlfriend, and I don’t need saving. What I need is all the Princess Prissy Bitch accessories in this apartment. That’s what I need. So thanks for finally inviting me in. It took you long enough.”

  Gaia felt abundantly sick to her stomach.

  How could she have been so hopelessly gullible? She was trained to detect lies just from the shifting of the eyes or the staggering of breaths in a sentence. She was trained in every aspect of profiling, trained to detect what character elements naturally combined to make an untrustworthy person or a potential criminal. Yet here she was… totally suckered by a lying junkie and some two-bit dealer who looked like an ugly Backstreet Boy. That’s how lonely Gaia had become. That’s how desperate for some purpose in life. That’s how much she loved and missed Mary Moss.

  And Gen was sure as hell right about one thing. She was no Mary. That strip of fake red hair should have been the tip-off. She was a fake. A total fake.

  “And you know what?” Gen went on. “I am so glad our little scam here is done, Gaia, because I am so sick of listening to your condescending crap. I don’t even know where you get off, thinking you’re going to fix my life? Your life’s the most screwed-up pathetic shit I’ve ever seen.”

  She was right about that, too.

  “Suggestion,” Gen added. “Instead of trying to turn me into some chick who’s already dead… why don’t you find yourself one real freakin’ friend? ’Cause your shit is tragic. It’s so tragic, I almost feel guilty scamming you. Except I don’t.”

  “Yeah, that’s real sweet,” Casper said. “You done with your little speech? Because it is freakin’ payback time. Where’s the other one?”

  “In there,” Gen said, motioning to the bedroom with her head. “Now, this…,” she whispered in Gaia’s ear, “this, I think you’re going to like.”

  “YOU DIDN’T TELL ME SHE WAS SO hot,” Casper announced as he pushed Tatiana through the bedroom doorway, holding his gun to the back of her head.

  * * *

  Reverse Snobbery

  * * *

  Tatiana gazed coldly into Gaia’s eyes as Casper shoved her toward a chair at the dining table. Gaia winced when she saw her face. She didn’t look terrified. She didn’t look angry. Not quite stunned, even. She looked almost resigned to this horrific fate. It was as if Tatiana had already known something like this was going to happen the moment Gaia had brought Gen into their house. As if it had only been a matter of time before Gaia found some way to make an absolute mess of things—to get them robbed of all their precious family heirlooms and then to get them all killed. Tatiana had probably been expecting something like this from the moment she’d first seen Gaia in her bedroom, lying in a pool of sweat, hallucinating all kinds of paranoid murderous scenarios.

  Gaia had despised Tatiana for every one of her offensive assumptions and lofty judgments. And they had all been correct. All Tatiana’s holier-than-thou, high-and-mighty presumptions had been disgustingly, embarrassingly right on the money. Bringing this low-level hustler into the house had been a terrible mistake. Terrible mistake—there was the understatement of the century. Gaia’s lousy judgment and reverse snobbery were about to get them both killed.

  No, it wasn’t even that. It wasn’t just the reverse snobbery or the lousy judgment. It was the curse. The Curse of Gaia Moore. Apparently being in close proximity to Gaia was really the only necessary qualification to fall prey to the curse. Gaia didn’t even have to like the person. Yes, she despised Tatiana. But she’d never wished something like this on her. Never.

  “Oh, man,” Casper complained. “I can’t believe I’m going to blow holes in this beautiful head.”

  “Will you shut up with that?” Gen snapped, keeping the knife secured to Gaia’s throat. “She looks like she was made in a goddamn factory.”

  “Yeah, well… either way, she’s gone.”

  Oh, Jesus. Find the way out of this, Gaia. What is the way out? She could think of nothing. Not one viable option. Gen and Casper probably didn’t even know how cleverly they’d placed themselves, but nonetheless it was practically foolproof. They were simply too far apart for Gaia to do anything. If she made a move on Gen, there was no way she could get to Casper fast enough before he pulled the trigger.

  “This is ridiculous,” Gaia complained, trying to stall. “What does she have to do with any of this?”

  “Oh, that’s real simple,” Casper said, running his gun through Tatiana’s hair. “You messed up my friends bad, so I’m going to mess up yours. Eye for an eye and all that.”

  “She’s not even my friend,” Gaia said coldly, searching desperately for the remotest inkling of a plan.

  Casper shrugged. “Yeah, well, Gen says you don’t have any friends, so she’s going to have to do.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Gaia argued, “I’m the one who messed up your friends. You should kill me, not her.”

  “Who said we weren’t going to do you?” Casper spat, looking more and more pissed off. “I think it’s time you shut your mouth and watched. Now you can see what it feels like when someone pops a bullet right through one of your friends.”

  “I didn’t even shoot your friends,” Gaia hollered. “They shot each other.”

  “I told you to shut the hell up!” Casper growled, ripping Tatiana’s head back by her hair and jabbing the gun into her left temple.

  “Just shoot her already” Gen complained. “Gaia doesn’t even like her. She hates the haughty bitch’s guts. She doesn’t give a shit whether she lives or dies.”

  “All right!” Casper hollered, securing the gun against her head.

  Tatiana’s face had gone totally blank as Casper tugged on her head like it wasn’t even attached to a body. All she could do was stare coldly at Gaia. Stare at her and curse her with her eyes as Casper pulled back the hammer of his gun.

  Once he’d flipped back the hammer, that nagging paranoid buzz that had been gnawing at Gaia’s stomach exploded into a sense of doom that shook her insides to the point of nearly vomiting. Fearful yet again when she needed to take action—it was hardly even a surprise now. She had scraped every ounce of her brain for a way out of this, and she’d failed to find one. So she stood there like a useless fool and apologized to Tatiana with her eyes. In this final moment, it seemed she was really no better than Tatiana. Just as wispy and timid. Just as utterly helpless.

  “Say good-bye,” Casper uttered. He tightened his outstretched arm and squeezed down slowly on the trigger. When Tatiana suddenly opened her mouth and began
to spew out a vicious stream of Russian words directly at Gaia.

  The volume and urgency of her voice had erupted from so completely out of nowhere that Casper actually flinched and let go of the trigger as he watched her growl with rage into Gaia’s face.

  “Holy crap.” He laughed nervously, looking over at Gen. “Bitch scared the living daylights out of me. What the hell language is she speaking?”

  “Russian,” Gen said. “I think she’s a little pissed at my buddy Gaia here.” She smiled. “Either that or she’s saying her prayers or some shit.”

  Gen was right about one thing. She was definitely pissed. But she wasn’t saying prayers at all. Far from it. Gaia listened to each harsh word being shot at her like gunfire:

  Get that pathetic helpless look off your face and work with me. If you think I’m going to let this needle-brained drug-dealing son of a bitch be my executioner, then you re truly out of your mind. Now, you listen to me. I am going to count to three, and then I am going to elbow this pathetic lowlife where it hurts. You do what you have to do, and we will get ourselves out of this. On three. Do you understand me?

  “Okay,” Gaia replied calmly.

  She was simply too amazed by Tatiana to offer a more detailed response.

  “Is she finished?” Casper laughed.

  Without further ado, Tatiana began a slow and steady countdown in Russian.

  Three… two… one…

  Without moving an inch from her seated position, Tatiana whipped her sharp, bony elbow directly into the center of Casper’s crotch, forcing out a high-pitched howl of agony as he dropped his gun and collapsed to the floor in a rolled-up fetal ball.

  Gaia seized her moment instantly, taking hold of the arm that Gen had around her neck with both hands and flipping her tragically skinny frame about five feet in front of her. Gen screamed out in pain as her entire skeleton cracked against the glossy hardwood floor of the living room. There was no way a hundred-pound junkie was going to be getting up from that fall anytime soon.

  Gaia rolled forward and grabbed the gun off the floor as Tatiana dropped to her knees and swiped up the knife. She quickly knelt over Gen and held the knife to her nose. Not that Gen would have been able to move, anyway.

  Casper had managed to make it back up to a crouching position, when Gaia hit him with a vicious kick combination. First a side kick straight to his gut and then a sweeping roundhouse kick to his jaw, rocking his entire body into the dining-room chairs before he slid down into a heap on the floor.

  Gaia quickly turned to Tatiana, speaking urgently in Russian. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” she replied in Russian. “But I want them out of here. I want them out of here now.”

  “You read my mind,” Gaia replied.

  Like clockwork, Gaia and Tatiana grabbed the mumbling, moaning Casper and dragged him straight across the floor right into the building’s hallway.

  “Let me get the other one,” Gaia requested. Tatiana stepped out of the way and left a clear path for Gaia. Gaia stomped back into the room and lifted Gen into her arms as though she were a bag of trash, carrying her bony frame out into the hallway and dumping her on top of Casper’s semiconscious body.

  She got down on one knee and tapped Gen’s half-conscious face a few times to get her attention. “You just keep doing what you’re doing, Gen. You keep using, and you stick with him… you’ll be dead in no time.”

  Gaia and Tatiana stepped into their apartment, but Gaia turned back with an afterthought. “We’re going to open this door again in five minutes. If you’re not gone… that will be bad.”

  “That will be very bad,” Tatiana agreed.

  Tatiana slammed the door closed.

  After a few moments of recovery, Gaia and Tatiana walked slowly over to Casper’s overstuffed Christmas bag and began to put the items back in their places.

  “I don’t think we need to tell my mother about this night,” Tatiana said as she examined the wiring on the back of the VCR.

  Gaia froze for a moment as she was setting the silver bowl back on the coffee table. Each moment of the last ten minutes had only served to inform her of what an absolute imbecile she was when it came to people. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “Da,” Tatiana replied even more quietly.

  They worked in silence for another few moments until Gaia just had to ask something. “‘Hit him where it hurts?’” she asked in Russian. “I didn’t know they used that expression in Russia.”

  “This is not right?” Tatiana asked. “Where it hurts? This is not where I hit him?”

  “No, it’s perfect,” Gaia said. “It’s perfect…. That’s exactly where you hit him.”

  “Good. That was where I wanted to hit him.”

  From: shred@alloymail.com

  To: gaia13@alloymail.com

  Time: 2:06 A.M.

  Re: I will delete this

  Gaia,

  God, I wish I could understand what happened that morning. I really, really do. I’m staring over at my bed, or our bed, or whatever, and that night that was only a few days ago… seems like it was about ten years ago.

  The thing is, I love you so much, Gaia, and I could have sworn you loved me, too, and now it seems like everything just fell out the window for no apparent reason at all. And I mean EVERYTHING, including the most important friendship in my life.

  Can you explain ANY of this to me any better than you have? Am I crazy, or did I see the actual you for two seconds in the cafeteria this afternoon? Wasn’t that you? Can we just sit down for a couple of normal minutes and talk it over? The actual me and the actual you?

  Yeah, I know, I know. Blahblahblahblahblah who cares who cares, right??

 

  her identity had fallen so far into the crapper that could no longer recognize anyone else’s identity, either.

  * * *

  purified hatred

  * * *

  WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THIS train, Gaia? Do you know what you’re doing on this train?

  * * *

  Electromagnet

  * * *

  She knew; she just didn’t want to tell herself. She was on the six train, heading down toward Ed’s … neighborhood. Not heading down toward Ed’s per se, just down toward his neighborhood. Because God knew she needed a break from the Upper East Side. A nice long break.

  It was just something about this night. This night had sent her one very basic message above all others. That message:

  This whole “new life” of yours … total, unmitigated disaster.

  Indeed, every single choice Gaia had made in her “new life” had not just backfired. It had back-exploded. Sticking to the Upper East Side had only brought her to Central Park. Central Park had only introduced her to Gen and Casper. Befriending Gen had nearly gotten her and Tatiana robbed and killed. Bad choices. Nothing but bad choices.

  And then there was the matter of her complete and utter misjudgment of both Tatiana and Gen. How could such a well-educated, perceptive person have gotten it so completely wrong? The only conclusion she could draw for herself was that her identity had fallen so far into the crapper that she could no longer recognize anyone else’s identity, either. That was why she’d roamed out of that Seventy-second Street apartment and onto a train downtown at two in the morning. Because downtown at least had a few remnants of a Gaia she could recognize. A few tattered remains of something resembling “home.” West Fourth Street. Washington Square Park.

  And Ed. Of course Ed. Ed was home.

  Her new life had in fact made her so ill that she’d actually found herself harking back to the days of the Perry Street town house and George and Ella Niven. Even that godforsaken place struck her as home tonight in her sickeningly glorified memories. And if those horrible days could feel like home … well, then things had gotten awfully bad.

  She climbed out of the train at Astor Place and stood on the small, windy island, trying to pick a direction. Gray’s Papaya would be close
d. So would the Krispy Kreme. Of course … Ed’s was just a few blocks away….

  She began to walk east in his direction. For chrissake, this was ridiculous. She could sneak in a little meeting with Ed. Just a few minutes. Maybe give him a slightly better explanation than the crap she’d been dishing out and despising herself for? Didn’t he deserve that? Just like he’d said?

  Or maybe they wouldn’t even have to talk. She could announce a no-talking rule, and they could just have a quick hug. Or maybe a little kiss. Or maybe even … Honestly, it was so late already, would they even be watching her that closely now? Whoever the hell they were? Would it really make that much of a difference if she stayed the night? One extra night? God, she wanted to stay the night. She wanted that so badly, it was sending painful bolts of electricity down her spine….

  Okay, STOP. No, mean literally STOP. Stop walking down this block.

  She froze on Sixth between First and Second in front of a long row of Indian restaurants that had closed for the night.

  Seeing Ed would only be for her. The hug, or the kiss, or … what she really wanted … would only be for her. And then Ed would be dead by the following day, and therefore so would she. It would not and could not happen. She wouldn’t let it. In spite of the nuclear-powered, billion-gigawatt electromagnet that was pulling her toward his house and his arms and his bed … she would turn around now and thus extend his life for years to come.

  Nope. Ed was home, but she couldn’t go all the way home. Downtown was the closest she was going to get. Or maybe …

  The park. At least she could revisit Washington Square Park tonight. There was a time when she had felt like that park was the only true home she had. It was too late to see Zolov or Renny or good old Mr. Haq. But at least the arch would always be lit up. Who knew? Maybe there would even be some legitimate criminals there tonight. Criminals she would be damn sure not to befriend or bring home as roommates.