They kept him in the hospital for another week just to make sure he recovered. Diane came by every morning and every evening after working her receptionist temp job. At the end of the week, Winston had exhausted the crossword puzzles she’d brought him, and daytime television drove him up the wall; he was absolutely itching to leave. Diane didn’t say anything during the drive home. Winston was still a little woozy from being supine for a month, so she had to help him out of the car, up the elevator, and into the apartment. The coolness of air conditioning greeted him like an old friend. Despite the nurse’s statement, it appeared Diane had found the time to finish unpacking and decorate the apartment. On the wall above the sofa hung five of Winston’s favorite personal photographs, the center one taken of a laughing Diane during a picnic when they’d first started going out. He loved the unbridled happiness of her face in that photo, the bliss.
“I wanted to surprise you,” she said, looking expectantly at him as she helped him down to the couch.
“It looks great, Dee,” he said.
Diane smiled and couple of tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. She laughed nervously and quickly swiped them away. “Oh Win, I was so afraid you’d never wake up. I don’t think I could ever handle that. Do you remember anything at all about being in the penthouse?”
He shook his head. “The doctor said I must have been hallucinating after the guy at the U-Haul place hit me and took my wallet.” Winston rubbed his forehead at the headache that was starting there. The doctor said he’d probably have headaches for a few months. “It felt real to me, though. So the penthouse was empty?”
“Yeah. No sign that anyone had lived there in years.”
“So what happened to Lucas?”
“Lucas? Who’s that?”
Winston abruptly yawned. He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. “You know, the guy who was living up there. We drank his honey mead.”
“Win, you’ve been through a lot. Maybe you should take it easy. Are you hungry?” Diane asked. “Anything to drink?”
“No, I think I’ll just go to bed.”
She helped him into the bedroom and undressed him, pulled the sheets up to his chin. Though it was only afternoon, she undressed too and climbed in next to him. A small rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, and Diane wrapped an arm around him. Thunderstorms always made her more than a little amorous. She kissed his neck, and the fatigue dissolved away. He wanted to lie in bed with his wife, and touch her, and reaffirm that she was real. Winston leaned over and kissed her long and slow.
When they separated, she asked, “Do you want to?”
He nodded. A butterfly fluttered in his stomach, and he couldn’t help but picture her with Lucas. “From behind.”
She looked startled for a moment, and Winston was convinced more than ever that what he’d seen in the penthouse had been a mental fabrication, but then she smiled, a grin that went all the way to her ears, and said, “Okay.”
Avoirdupois
After parking, a stroll past the playgrounds, swings, teeter-totters, slides, the boat ride that is not actually a boat ride, past the old rail caboose now used as an interactive museum, past maple and oak and bamboo, and up to the Dentzel Carousel, 85 years old and still wooden strong, steam-powered, accompanied by an equally aged Wurlitzer 125 Band Organ, and you approach the ticket taker with money in hand, ready to relive your youth, the hooting calliope music filling the air, the painted horses and giraffes and ostriches and lions inviting you, mouths open, to ride their backs, but, “Sorry,” says the man, “you’re too old,” when what he really means is, “You’re too fat,” because standing on the boards next to the impaled animals are mothers and fathers, supporting their children straddling the wooden steeds, and some of them are older than you, some much older.
When you point this out, the man says, “Sorry, full up,” even though only half the saddles are occupied, and he closes the chain link door with a snap, and the music crescendos and the carousel begins to spin, round and round, and you know that no matter how long you hang around here the ticket taker will never let you on, afraid you may crush the ancient craftsmanship restored thirty years ago, and he doesn’t want to have to explain to his supervisor how the heavy chick just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So you walk away, wander through the park itself, full today, a nice day, blue skies, jacket weather, with families hoping to lure children away from video game consoles and out into the crisp fresh air, some with lunches from Bojangles or Boston Market splayed out on picnic tables, and the smell reminds you that you skipped breakfast because your brother had forgotten to take his meds again and had had a meltdown, trashing his apartment, huddled in the corner weeping, afraid the cops were after him again, or the mob, or one secret society or another, or whatever conspiracy was running through his head today, and it took a call to his caretaker for him to settle down and ingest his dosage and disappear into the bedroom for a coma-like sleep that would last at least until evening, and you just had to get out of there, sick of having to keep coming over again and again because he is all you have now, but unable to live your own life, find your own love, just wanting to escape for a few hours, maybe remember how it felt when your mother, before the car crash, way before, even before your brother was born, would bring you to the park and put you on the carousel, and it would feel as if you were flying.
Past the picnic tables, and over the old wooden bridge that crossed the lake, boards complaining underfoot, and all along the wide wooden handrails are the carvings and markings of dozens of lovers’ semiotic expressions, J & J 4EVER or Pat + Kenny circumscribed by a heart, and you yearn to have something to add to the collection, but the last date you went on was three years ago, blind, and it ended badly, with insults and threats, and false insinuations, and you had to change your phone number afterward.
In the lake below swim a family of geese, some white and some grey and some the color of milk chocolate left out in the sun too long, all squonking and it sounds as if they are yelling, “Too fat! Go away! Too fat!” while they have no reason to say such things, paddling with big fat goose rumps high in the air, their chin wattles wobbling. As you approach, they paddle harder, extending necks close down to the water, kicking splash behind them in their efforts to get away, far away from the fat girl on the bridge.
You keep walking, the path taking you adjacent to the built-up creek nearby, surrounded by maple trees in the last throes of autumn, leaves burning with the scarlet rage of sunlight, coupled with tiny seedpods, miniature casings containing the potentiality for more maple trees, and the sight mesmerizes you, lulls you into climbing the gentle hill, clouds the knowledge of the sign near the creek warning wary transgressors away, and you don’t care, caught up in this moment of luminous beauty, your worries and cares melting away in the face of such gorgeosity, and so you hardly notice your proximity to the creek itself, to the enormous stones cut and shaped and implanted in its deep sides, and you don’t even perceive the strong velvety vine that emerges from the creek water until it travels up your leg, rubbing and caressing, up over your waist and your arms, whispering all the while, consoling, telling you that you are beautiful, that you are not fat at all, that you are just the right size and shape for who you are, that you deserve more, oh so much more, the tip of the vine strokes your cheeks and the tiny hairs tickle, its embrace encompassing all of you now, and the relief rushes out of you, a lover finally, releasing pent-up desire and frustration and shame, to evaporate in the air until all that is left is love, all you need, and so when the strong arm of your lover pulls back into the creek, you almost follow willingly, obligingly. Almost, because then you remember your brother, alone in his own head, depending on you, needing your companionship, your sisterly love, and who will take care of him when you are gone? Most likely he’ll be locked away in an institution, surrounded by white walls and other inmates of their own minds, and you can’t even imagine leaving him in a place like that, no matter how rel
uctant you are to continue playing parent, and so you halt your steps and whisper to the vine, thanking it for the kind words but you’ll have to decline, so it detaches itself and slinks slowly, sadly, back into the creek.
There is a kind of bounce in your step as you exit the park, a newfound confidence; if love could happen once, it could happen again, you just need to keep looking and hoping and not giving up. It’s out there, waiting for you, making its way, ready for you to make itself complete, to feel whole. In the meantime, you’ll take a class in nature photography, come back here and capture it all in halide silver.
Great Responsibility
Spider-Man jerks awake behind the wheel of his parked Volkswagen Squareback, his sudden jolt into consciousness the effect of a voice shouting on the other side of his driver’s side window. Spider-Man has been sleeping in his car a lot lately, anchoring his vessel along whichever Los Angeles street he can find that is overlooked by the Parking Violations Bureau. He’s forgotten the name of the desolate road on which he is now located, but he’s never been good at remembering L.A.’s thoroughfares, so far from his native New York City.
“Hey, chica!” the voice yells again, having moved up the street ahead, attached to a brawny young tough in a sleeveless white shirt and low-slung jeans, his muscled arms rippling with tattoos. “Chica, I say, I’m talking at you!”
The young black woman the tough follows is dressed in business attire and carries a leather satchel, just the type Spider-Man would expect to see in a Hollywood executive production office elsewhere in the city, her high heels and tight black skirt a detriment as she hurries away from the aggressive Chicano at her back. Her clacking steps, audible even within the interior of the Squareback, take her toward the strip mall just up ahead, toward the supposed safety brought on by the presence of other people, but this hope is an illusion, and Spider-Man knows that it won’t save her.
Spider-Man steps out of his car, blinking in the harsh afternoon sun, then shuts the door carefully and quietly so as to avoid detection by the tough, as well as to prevent any dislodging of the five thousand brightly-colored strips of duct tape plastered all over the exterior of the vehicle in patterns designated by her, the young biracial girl—
No, no time to think about that, it’s time to get to work. He locks the car door, pulls on his mask and silently pursues the pursuer.
As expected, the tough soon catches up to the young exec with a sharp laugh. “Hey, puta,” he sings, drawing the sound out, pooooooooo-tah, “dint you hear me back there? I’m talking at you, girl.” He grabs her by the elbow and she recoils at the touch, causing him to lunge forward and grip her at the triceps. “Bitch, gonna learn you some respect,” he growls and pulls her into the alley between a McDonald’s and a Jiffy Lube.
Spider-Man’s heartbeat thunders in his head and sweat trickles down behind his ears under the stuffy mask, but he does not slow his pace as he follows them into the alley. At the far end, the tough—whom Spider-Man can now see is white rather than Latino, a poseur, play-acting the part of the machote—has pinned the exec to a Mickey-D Dumpster, and is whispering something intently in her ear, still unaware of Spider-Man’s presence.
“Stop, criminal!” Spider-Man shouts, the words slightly muffled behind the mask, and the machote falso looks up with a start. “Unhand that young woman, scoundrel!”
The tough just stares at him for a moment, then barks out a laugh.
“Why don’t you go mind your biz elsewhere, ese? Eh, araña loco? This don’t concern you.”
“I’m afraid all law-breakers are my business,” Spider-Man says, striking a heroic pose with fists on hips. “Now, unhand her or suffer the consequences.”
“Ah, fuck this noise, yo,” the tough says, then reaches into his pants pocket, withdraws a revolver, and fires. The impact knocks Spider-Man off his feet, and he crashes to the concrete, landing on his back hard enough to rattle all the bones in his body, vaguely aware of the tough now yelling, “Ha! Spidey-sense not tingling now, eh, motherfucker?”
Spider-Man lies on the ground for a long moment, dazed, slowly regaining his wits, then with a grunt he rises to a sitting position. His right arm doesn’t seem to work anymore, and a dull throbbing pulses from his shoulder, but he is otherwise unharmed. There is no pain. Spider-Man doesn’t feel pain.
The image of another white man with a gun abruptly imposes itself onto his mind’s eye, a different tough, older and unshaven and twitchy, a year-old image that won’t go away no matter how much he blinks or shakes his head. The likeness of the twitchy tough was accompanied by the recalled report of an accidental gunshot, an aural rupture in the world, an incongruous sound that at the time he thought was a car backfiring, but then in his memory the ten-year-old biracial girl who was standing next to him tumbled slowly to the ground and the gunman was running away and the primal roar of grief and disbelief that erupted from Spider-Man’s throat sounded as if it were coming from all around him.
And now, as Spider-Man rises from the concrete and charges the machote falso, the roar comes again, his entire body filled with rage and vengeance even as he watches the tough raising the gun once more, not caring not caring because his little Thalía is dead dead dead and he couldn’t do anything to stop it and he doesn’t deserve to live in a world that would cruelly snuff out a being of such light and humor and love, and he braces himself for the second bullet to punch through his body, when the black woman suddenly throws an elbow into the tough’s throat and he drops the gun in surprise. She sweeps his leg from under him, and he topples to the ground of the alley just as Spider-Man arrives to give the tough a sharp kick to the ribs with his booted foot. The tough screams and Spider-Man kicks him again, harder, feeling something give way in the young man’s chest. He steps back, the energy abruptly drained out of him, and the woman takes his place, aiming and then driving the pointed toe of her expensive executive shoe into the attacker’s balls.
Spider-Man pulls off his mask and leans against the alley wall, watching as the tough just writhes on the ground, his face turning purple at the pain. Spider-Man uses the mask to mop the sweat from his face, and breathes heavily. He feels quite exhausted. His shoulder aches and he still can’t move his arm. The woman steps into view with the machote falso’s revolver in her hands, aiming at its former owner. She glances at Spider-Man.
“Nice pajamas,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“That was really fucking stupid what you did. He could have killed you.”
“Yes. But he also could have killed you, citizen. And I could not let that stand.”
“Well, thank you for that.” She adjusts her stance. “Do me a favor, web-head? My bag’s over there on the ground, and my cell phone’s inside. Why don’t you call 9-1-1 and get the cops here quick before this bastardo recovers, yeah?”
Spider-Man does as he is told, and within fifteen minutes both police and paramedics have arrived. The machote falso is unceremoniously cuffed and thrown in the back of a squad car. Spider-Man sits down on the curb next to a row of newspaper pay-boxes as a female paramedic attends to his shoulder and a male police officer takes his statement. He doesn’t know where the young exec has gone.
“Lucky for you,” the paramedic says, taping gauze over both the entry and exit wound, “it went straight through and didn’t hit any bones.” She jogs over to the ambulance and returns with a blister pack of little white pills and a support strap for his arm; he refuses the latter.
“It will interfere with my web-slinging,” he says.
“Suit yourself,” she says, and drops the strap into his lap. “You’re going to need to get checked out at the hospital.”
“I will be fine,” he says. “Spider-Man does not go to the hospital.”
The police officer interjects: “Do you have someone who can take you home? Anyone you can call?”
And before he can tell them both that Spider-Man does not have a home, he has rattled off the memorized series of digits that was once his
home telephone number. The officer steps to his patrol car and relays the number to the dispatcher.
“Would you happen to have a cigarette?” Spider-Man asks the paramedic. “I don’t normally smoke, but this is not a normal occasion, and I’m craving one right now.”
The paramedic looks around her, then digs in a pants pocket, produces a pack of Salems, shakes one out for him, and then lights it. The smoke expands within him, but does not fill all of the gaping holes of his self. Still, a slow wave of calm cascades through his body.
Some time later, after everyone else has left, Spider-Man still sits in the same spot as a black Saab stops in front of him. A beautiful Latina in a very expensive pinstriped pantsuit and long-sleeved doctor’s white coat steps out and approaches him.
“Daniel? Can you hear me?”
Spider-Man doesn’t look up. The name is unfamiliar, so he assumes she’s speaking to someone else.
“Danny? It’s Liliana, your wife.” At his continued silence, she sighs and says, “Papi?”
At the mention of his old pet name, he finally raises his head and says, “Spider-Man doesn’t have a wife. Or a daughter.”
“No, papi,” she says, her voice catching in her throat, “he doesn’t, not . . . not anymore.” She reaches a hand down and helps him to stand. “Look, you’re staying with me tonight. I told the police I’d take care of you. You’re coming home with me. Do you understand?”
Spider-Man looks into familiar brown eyes flecked with gold, the same eyes as those of the ten-year-old biracial girl who won’t stop falling to the ground. Thalía. He makes himself say the name out loud, and the Latina’s face drops, and then she is hugging him close and asking where he has been for the past year and saying many more words that he can’t catch because they come out in such a rush of both English and Spanish, and he finds himself gripping her back and inhaling the clean insistent smell of her.
“Come on,” she says, stepping back to wipe at her eyes and then taking his left hand in her right. “Let’s go home.”
Strange Mammals Page 4
