Father Bunny: “All the time.”
Father Bunny, finally, after his hand crawls its way close to the knob, opens the door. The hallway is grimy and dim, unlovely.
And it’s empty.
Then (the few thin parts of farther she can catch) . . . She (the sequel to the vanished girl who didn’t make it through the riotcircles) eyes at the level of the doorknob (withholding uttering the constructs of desire) looks at the emptiness on the table . . . A little blood on her face. His voice pressed to her clasped lips. The tension in the room will not disappear . . . The shadows distort, in the shape of a tide (with a mouthful of Evermore) they swell and craft claw-images on her shoulder. No prospects for heart, she shifts from her knees slowly finding she has feet . . .
Stands.
Unbending—like it or not—front and symmetry to meet center.
Blood lengthens, connects.
Pins and needles, digesting the speed of a new station, chime.
Nerves. Knees.
Wobbly.
Reddened eyes. Mouthful of sensation: “I do not think you deserve me.” Unclasped the point gets vehement, moves from the bed to the momentum and 3 get squeezed off at the afterword leaving . . .
Steps (urging hurry) that don’t follow the dots. Her cheap felt slippers leave no footprints on the dusty floor . . . She finds her shoes. Coat. Purse . . . Door—hinges creak—opens. Door—hinges creak—closes . . . Hallway, dim light no tenants. Pale laughter (with no vigor to communicate) from a TV leaks into the hall . . . Her room without the canticles of light . . .
Cracked plaster.
Walls wearing scratches of compromising.
A lot of narrow stairs—the wood was varnished once . . .
Here
looks like a photograph she approached . . . There was an empty seat, and widening in the sound of embers, a waltz and broken glass . . .
A glass of embers—
And she was waiting . . .
Face
(picking at the whirring blindness in the briars)
in
the mirror. Admires her eyes. Admires her nipples and her thighs.
Starlet-red lips: “Long secrets.”
The face in the mirror goes black.
The Great White Face appears in the mirror, says, “That is the password.”
She looks down at her feet.
Down at her feet . . . A minute? An hour? Lenses feeding inland aren’t qualified to conquer the traces it carries. Sees what seems to be . . .
It’s raining.
Thunderous applause from the TV tries to catch her flight—
It does not submerge her screaming.
It is 7 o’clock (again).
The audience on TV laughs. Laughs again.
The phone rings . . .
She has her ready face on.
The door to the hallway is open, but she has not moved from her seat on the sofa. Dare she rise and close it?
The phone continues to ring . . .
Thinks maybe—maybe this time she should not get in the car.
The applause does not stop.
Dare she?
Wonder about the picturesque ambitions and suspicions of rabbits
and what the Great Black Heart of Fate draws in the cages of time
and turning and facing other directions.
It is after 7 o’clock and
the phone
(no partition from the hardened arrival of rain)
thick
as a shaft of
teeth
continues to
ring
LAKE STREET
MP JOHNSON
Driving east on Lake Street, the shadows become increasingly less glamorous. Braden drives this way late at night, not so much to clear his head as to fill it. First with images of college girls in Uptown clutching their too-high, too-expensive heels in their hands, only in their drunkenness willing to admit the pain their choice of footwear has caused them. The shadows cling to the brick walls of trendy bars. They slide behind these girls, get in front of them. No matter how hard they try though, they can’t come close to the sunshine yellow dresses and perfectly tanned skin, so they follow Braden instead, collecting in the dents and scratches of his car, ready to go where they’re more welcome.
The shadows like it better closer to Stevens Avenue, and so does he. No lines of perfumed frat boys waiting for overpriced drinks, just dive bars and fast food joints with peeling paint and shattered bottles in their parking lots. Honesty.
Mystery. Despite taking place immediately beneath flickering streetlights, transactions here are obscured by the darkness of the shadows. Those involved prefer it that way. What changes hands? Guns? Drugs?
The darkness doesn’t let Braden see. He has no more right to be here than he does to be back in Uptown with the salon blondes giggling and vomiting radiance. That’s the message sent. He’s allowed to pass through, go to a drive-up window and get a bucket of chicken. Then he’s allowed to leave. He doesn’t hurry.
His headlights have no strength here. They die a foot in front of his car. He’s left to squint into the honesty and the mystery unaided as he volleys bites of golden fried chicken from the tip of his tongue to the back of his throat.
He doesn’t see the girl until she’s against the grill.
When he slams on the brakes, the girl flies back. He sees her bare feet go up where her head was and thinks he killed her. The shadows rush in and he considers fleeing, letting them reclaim her. Surely they will pick her up and send her on her way. Would they give up one of their own so easily? They back away as he shoulders open his creaky door and steps out. They don’t want her.
Maybe the girl doesn’t belong here any more than Braden does: his pale gut and balding head reflecting moonlight, streetlights, all lights. It’s as if they’re pointing at him. He wants to growl and tell them not to judge, that he has darkness inside—violence, anger—and he can barely contain it.
But that would just be talk.
“Get the fuck out of here, you white-ass faggot piece of shit!”
Braden peers into the murk beneath an overpass, where the voice comes from. Three men emerge. They are bigger than he is. He’s less than six feet, and carries little weight beyond his midsection. They carry weight, and much more. The shadows peel back enough to let him see what’s in their hands.
He’s not ready for this, he realizes. He just plays with the darkness, dips his toes in it. Still, he reaches down to help the girl up. She ignores him and touches the back of her head, fingering through sooty locks and coming back with a blood-covered hand. Then she passes out.
“Leave the bitch and drive away!”
Braden tries to say “no,” but the word doesn’t come out. The shadows don’t want his words any more than they want him. He scoops the girl up and throws her into his backseat, managing to knock her against every hard surface along the way.
Bullets spark against his door as he climbs in and hits the gas, barreling so fast in reverse that cars scatter onto the sidewalk. He hits nothing. He continues in this manner for two blocks. Then he stops, puts his car in drive and turns off of Lake Street.
The girl’s not a prostitute. She isn’t worn like the others Braden’s seen stalking toward cars late at night on that part of Lake Street. No bruises decorate the mocha skin around the mouth of her denim miniskirt. Her hair looks freshly washed and conditioned, so thick and black. He smells lilacs, not smoke, when he carries her into his apartment and sets her on the couch. He grabs a towel from the pile of dirty laundry in the corner and gently places it under her head. Blood soaks into it.
He doesn’t turn on the lights. The bulbs are burned out. He’s been living by the flashing light of the television screen and the tender strands of moonlight that seep through the windows. It’s not that he can’t afford new ones; he just hasn’t gotten around to buying them.
Staring at the girl, Braden can’t get a fix on her age. When he kneels in front of her,
she looks to be in her early twenties. When he hovers behind the couch and glares down at her, she could pass for late thirties, his age. He goes back and forth between the two positions, wondering when she will wake up. What will he say?
Her eyelids tremble and he decides not to tell her that he hit her.
“You hit me,” she says.
“No,” he replies. “I saved you. Some men were after you. Thugs.” He enjoys the way the last word rolls off his tongue, with the slightest hint of “I’ve dealt with their kind before,” which isn’t true. He’s never been in such a situation. He realizes he should be shaking, but something about this woman makes him feel safe.
Her lips. They’re almost as wide as his fingers, but they thin out when she smiles and says, “Thank you.”
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“I can’t remember,” she replies. “I can’t remember anything.”
“I didn’t hit you,” he reminds her.
“Where am I?” she asks.
“You’re in my apartment. You’re safe here. Those thugs can’t find you. I’ll just call you Greta for now, if that’s okay.”
She smiles again and Braden is suddenly thankful for driving ten miles an hour when he hit her. Crushing a smile like hers would have set him back more in karma than he could ever possibly repay, not that he ever tries to make up for his misdeeds.
He doesn’t hesitate in pursuing his next misdeed, leaning toward those lips from in front of the couch, from the most appealing angle, and stealing a kiss. He doesn’t linger. He keeps his eyes locked on hers, ready to draw back as soon as the slightest hint of anger flashes across her amber irises. It never comes, but he pulls away quickly anyway, not willing to press his luck. A face like his usually doesn’t find itself against a face like hers. Not that he’s ugly. He’s just plain. Poorly kept.
He sits on the edge of the couch, his butt close to her thighs. They don’t say anything. He’s glad his apartment is dark. Piles of laundry look much more mysterious when not revealed by an accusatory sixty-watt glare. There’s just as much chance that the shadows hide hundred dollar bills, fancy suits and business cards as they do blank job applications, ten-year-old T-shirts with holes in the armpits and grime encrusted pennies that he used to scrape the scabs off his knees after a drunken fall. In the darkness there can be no disappointment.
“My head hurts so bad,” she whispers.
“I’m sorry you don’t know who you are, Greta,” he replies.
“Are you sure we’re safe?” she asks.
Braden plunges into the murk and comes back with a golf club. He’s affixed nails to it with duct tape. “I used to have nightmares about being burglarized,” he explains. “That’s why I created this. I call it the Face Ripper.”
She sits up on the couch and blinks. Every one of her eyelashes is perfectly separated and curled, framing eyes that have never been bloodshot. She’s one of them, he realizes, one of the college girls from Uptown. But she seems deeper somehow, like maybe she carries some darkness inside her.
“Why were you on that part of Lake Street, Greta?” he asks.
She squishes her eyes closed, as if trying to force her lids into her brain to shovel out her lost memories. “I don’t know!”
The way she looks at him, like she wants to ask everything but can’t even remember the right questions, makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to tell her about himself. He wants to keep that in the shadows too. Getting a monthly allowance from Mom and working part time at a gas station is nothing to illuminate.
There is one thing he can show her though. He turns on the TV and puts in a disc. The screen flashes an image of a log. Off screen, a chainsaw roars to life.
“I directed this commercial for a local hardware company,” he lies. Sort of. His brother directed it. Braden co-directed and came up with the idea.
The chainsaw buzzes onto the screen. Slowly, it cuts into the wood. Instead of sawdust, blood spurts out. The log quivers and screams. The screams are actually Braden’s, but he doesn’t mention that fact, or the fact that he spent hours practicing to make certain they sounded perfect. Red spatters across the screen, spelling out the name of the store: Gillick’s Hardware.
“They refused to pay me for it. They said it was too dark.”
Greta grabs Braden by the wrist and pulls him close. After some fumbling, he is inside of her, thrusting so hard it strains his lower back. As her still-bloodstained fingertips run through his little remaining hair, all he can think is that he’s going too fast, that he hasn’t even licked her nipples. He doesn’t kiss his way across her clavicle. He doesn’t clasp his hands into hers. All he does is cum. Then he does everything he can to avoid making contact with her gaze, for fear that he will see some hint of disappointment.
He puts his boxer shorts over his head, covering his eyes, and runs for his bedroom.
In the morning, Braden steps anxiously into the living room, only to find a man with a dusty burlap sack over his head. The man snores wildly, draped across the couch where the girl—where Greta—should be. The sound that comes out of Braden is so grating it pulls particles of his esophagus with it, sending them into the dank apartment air and contorting them into some arcane SOS.
Even with the sun ripping through the blinds at full force, the apartment seems dark, and it only gets darker when the man sits up, holds out his calloused hands in a “halt” gesture and says, “Stop screaming! It’s me.”
“Where’s Greta?” Braden asks, trying to remember where he put Face Ripper.
“It’s me!” the man says again.
“What?” Braden feels like he’s been wedged into the wrong conversation.
“It’s me! From last night! The girl you saved from those men! Greta!” As the man utters these words, his voice grows deeper. The nerves under Braden’s eyes twitch.
“But you’re not her,” Braden replies slowly, uncomfortable stating something so obvious as he grabs Face Ripper from the corner. “You’re not even a girl!”
“But I am!” the man exclaims, standing up. He is easily a foot taller than Braden.
When the man lifts the burlap sack over his head, Braden wants to beg him to stop, but can’t. The shadows from every corner climb onto Braden and weigh him down. They hold his mouth shut. He can’t cry out when the man’s face is revealed, lipless mouth first. The teeth are perfect, white and even, which makes the grizzled meat around them all the more horrid. A nose hangs like two fingers that have melted together, holes drilled in their tips like nostrils. He has one eye, but three times as many lids, each intent on closing as soon as the next opens. He may have had more face at one point. It looks as if he did, but it has been removed and the wound cauterized.
He lunges forward and grabs Braden’s wrists. “Don’t you remember?”
Braden forgets about Face Ripper in his hand and lets the man press that mess of a mouth against his. The clicking of incisors against incisors is more than he can bear. Could this be the same person? Is this really Greta? No, that clicking is real. The strength of the hands wrapped around his wrists is real. But then what about last night? Was that not real? Had he not caressed that lovely mocha skin? Braden pulls away.
“Last night you seemed so eager,” the man says, letting Braden go.
“I’m sorry,” Braden replies, realizing that his houseguest means no harm. He wonders if he should tell the man about the collision. Would that anger the man? Would that make him leave? Would that peel away the thin layer of pus left on Braden’s lips?
The houseguest’s snout wiggles from side to side as he unzips his turquoise windbreaker. He sways his hips, dancing to unheard music.
“Wait!” Braden yells.
The houseguest drops his windbreaker. Underneath, he wears a stained white polo shirt. He lifts it up daintily, pinkies extended, revealing a bulging stomach—more bulging than Braden’s. The hair radiating from his belly button has been flattened against his skin from sleeping in his clothes. Dried s
weat keeps it in place.
Rubbing his gut, he states, “It’s yours.”
“What?” Braden asks.
“It’s yours and it’s due soon. You’re the only one.”
Braden’s grip around Face Ripper tightens. He ponders each of the twenty shiny nails taped to the head of the golf club. It’s one of the few things he inherited from his dad after the accident. All the rest went to his mom, and she doles it out as needed. He wonders how much doling would need to be done to hire a lawyer. If he kills this man, he could claim self-defense. Unless, when the body hits the ground, the man reverts to Greta, the real Greta, twitching and asking, “Why?”
The knocking on the door comes as a relief. Perhaps a neighbor heard Braden’s cries. Perhaps someone will come in and tell Braden what this is standing in front of the couch: gorgeous woman or decayed man. Braden hides Face Ripper behind his back and opens up, ready to formulate the question.
The visitor is ready with an answer before the question is asked.
“That’s her!” the lead thug commands his two comrades. Still draped in Lake Street shadows, the man’s ebony skin gives way to tired lines beneath his eyes, speckles of gray hair on his chin, the word “Lover” tattooed across his neck in cursive. “Kill this faggot and get that bitch.”
Braden swings Face Ripper.
Upon contact with Lover’s jutting cheekbone, the weapon does not grab all available meat with its nails and leave a bare skull, as expected. Instead, the nails bend to the side, the duct tape failing when needed the most. Worthless.
“I appreciate that,” Lover says as he touches the tiny scratches on his face with thick fingers. “I appreciate the motivation.”
Then he lifts his gun and shoots Braden.
Braden crumbles. At first, he thinks he’s dead, or at least on the way. Blood pours out at a pretty substantial pace, collecting on the hardwood floor around him. When he realizes that the bullet only grazed his shoulder, he considers climbing to his feet, pressing his gut against the six-pack visible through Lover’s tank top and staring the man down. But Braden doesn’t do things like that. He drives slowly past Lake and Stevens, winks at the prostitutes and thinks bad thoughts before continuing on to get his bucket of chicken. He never stops. He never does anything more than tickle the shadows. So now he keeps still, hoping the thugs will forget about him.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 23
