When Watched

by Leopoldine Core

  “It’s funny that you smoke lights,” he said. “I mean there’s no point. You suck em so hard.”

  “I know,” Miranda said with shame, stubbing the cigarette out on the window ledge. “I’ve tried to stop. But time passes incredibly slowly without cigarettes. A day goes on for weeks.” She began fondling her hair. “I can’t deal with that kind of time.”

  Drew smiled. He reached up and felt around for Miranda’s breast. “Your heart,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s about ready to pop out of your chest.”

  “Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

  “Sorry. I’m really protective with people. With everyone but myself, that is.”

  A car alarm began wailing in the distance and Miranda shut the window. Drew stared at her. His face was lit now by moonlight. “Have you published anything?” he asked.

  Miranda shook her head. She was a little devastated by the question. “No. I do try though,” she said. “Whenever I write a good story, I try to find a home for it.” She sighed. “But it always winds up an orphan. Then I write something else.”

  “That would be a good book title though. Orphans,” Drew said.

  “It would.” Miranda switched on the gooseneck lamp by the bed and wrote ORPHANS on a yellow Post-it. “Do you mind if I use that?”

  “Not at all.”

  “If I wrote a story about you—I mean—about us, that’s what I’d call it.”

  Drew seemed to like this idea. “How would you describe me?”

  “I don’t know. I would say you kind of changed reality for me.”

  Drew tipped his head. “Explain.”

  “Well you make it seem like everyone has their own gender.”

  “That’s good,” Drew said, his eyes marked with pleasure. “Because everyone does.”

  A Coffin

  He is sitting at the kitchen table, staring hard at it. His mother just called and he’s replaying the conversation in his mind. She said, “Shirley’s dead.” Shirley is his sister. Was. And talking to his mother was not like talking to an actual person. It was like turning on the radio for a minute. Because she makes herself a stranger. She speaks in a flat and even way, like she was raised by machines. And he is not surprised that she is this same demented ghost on the day of her daughter’s death. He is even a little comforted because he’s a demented ghost too.

  So this is my reaction, he thinks. I feel nothing. It occurs to him that he is very dirty. He’s been wearing the same shirt and underwear for two days. He was dirty before he got the call so it’s no excuse. And the thought of showering or even changing his underwear feels impossible, like he would upset the delicate ecosystem under his clothes.

  What surprises him is that he is not surprised. Shirley even sounds like the name of a dead person, he thinks. He almost laughs.

  She had been in medical school and dropped out. She decided to become an interior decorator and then decided not to. She liked to sing but she could only sing drunk. Ambivalence is a low life-force, he thinks. She didn’t even like being drunk. He remembers her crawling over to him at a Christmas party and saying, “I need help.” She was laughing though, which disturbed him. “Stop laughing,” he said, taking her by the arm.

  Then he realized she was crying and his face closed up. “Stop it,” he said and his recoiling only made her cry harder. He remembers her splotchy face before she threw it down onto his lap. He feels her particular weight and his eyes fill with anger, then awe. She will never cry again, he thinks.

  He leaves the kitchen and sits in a big navy cushioned chair. The television is on and it looks like a crime drama is playing. There are two faces having a serious conversation. The actors make small ugly expressions the way normal people do in pain and it seems a little obscene, like they’re making fun of tragedy. He turns it off.

  He wonders when he will die in relation to all his friends. Will I be the last one standing? Or is Shirley prelude to the surprising event of my death next week? He imagines a group of people discussing the strangeness of their concurrent deaths over coffee.

  He calls the woman he’s dating and she comes over. He regrets having called her. Not because he dislikes her. Because he has now realized that he wants to be alone.

  She guides him to his bed and they sit down. He doesn’t want to have sex. He makes that very clear. Then he announces that Shirley thought she had been a cat in a past life. “Because she loved cats,” he says. “I couldn’t be nice to her when she said stuff like that.”

  The woman smiles patiently. When it has been quiet awhile, she says, “I had a friend who thought he was a passenger on the Titanic.”

  “What an idiot,” he says instantly.

  She stares at him.

  “That’s like saying I was a pharaoh in Egypt,” he says.

  She laughs.

  “What a mundane mind,” he says.

  “He wasn’t an idiot,” she smiles. “He just thought he knew what people wanted to hear.” She looks into her lap. “And the truth is that a lot of people do like hearing that sort of thing.”

  “What people?”

  “Ordinary people.”

  He nods. She rubs his leg and stares into his eyes. He doesn’t like it. He moves his gaze to a gray corner of the room.

  “She was so miserable,” he declares. “All the fucking time. I think she wanted to be really successful or famous or something. But she couldn’t even hold a job.”

  “That’s the thing about being young,” she says. “You have something the world wants but the world doesn’t know it yet.”

  This gets his attention. “I don’t know if Shirley had anything the world wanted.” He sighs. “She kept changing her mind. It’s like she died of vagueness.”

  They lie down in their clothes and she holds him tightly. He feels restless and like an alien. He feels that he misses someone. He thinks it must be someone he used to date and wonders who. But he realizes that it is no single person. Because he has felt this brand of alien his whole life. Each new relationship frames it a little differently, he thinks.

  Then he thinks back on his mother’s voice over the phone. What she said at the end of their conversation was “She should be in a coffin.” Then, “Your father wants an urn.” He feels disgusted. He thinks it sounds like his parents are debating how to serve his sister to the family, how to roast and season her body. And all for the occasion of their grief, which is more an embarrassed sense of duty.

  The truth is that he’s hearing things. The room is quiet but there are several voices competing in the sewer of his thoughts.

  He can’t tell if it’s Shirley or a woman he dated or one he’s never met but a woman in his head is screaming and there’s a laugh in her voice. Maybe someone’s chasing her, trying to tickle her, he thinks.

  He also hears what some gum on the street might hear during a storm, shoes and a million raindrops coming down like spankings.

  Then he hears a dog alone. A dog in a car, barking its heart out.

  The Hitch

  Dawn woke up with a fever. It had snowed and the window poured with brutal white light. She pulled the blanket up over her shoulders, squinted in agony, then struggled into her slippers and shuffled to the kitchen.

  Laurel sat reading the paper, sipping coffee from a Smurf mug. She wore what she always wore, a 1960s school uniform, gray stockings, and black penny loafers. It solved the problem of what to wear, she said. “Because this is always the right thing to wear.” Laurel had big dark eyes and a giant head. Her body was quite small by comparison and from far away the disparity made her look like a child. But up close, she looked every bit of her twenty-five years and even older. Laurel’s face was shadowy and broken down from years of chain-smoking and binge drinking. When men walking behind her shouted lewd things on the street, they were alarmed at who they saw when she tu
rned her head. Laurel joked about it. She said it was a gift, her weather-beaten face. She said: “The world is a scary place for little girls.”

  “I think I have a fever,” Dawn said, clutching her skull with both hands.

  “So stay home,” Laurel said, not looking up from her paper.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I just can’t.”

  Laurel looked up, irritated. “You’re not an animal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you were an animal you’d have to push the cart no matter how you felt.”

  “But I am an animal. I have to push the cart.”

  Laurel glared.

  “I can’t lose the money.”

  “I’ll lend you the money.”

  Dawn stared into space. “Fine,” she said and walked back to her room. But once she heard Laurel leave, she got back out of bed and took two aspirin, then dressed and went to work.

  Outside she watched the white of her breath. She passed a bum in a Santa hat, then a determined-looking blonde with a shopping bag. Just past eleven a.m., the Lower East Side was already crawling with shoppers of a particular sort. People with money. Dawn walked stiffly, peering at them. She had grown up in the neighborhood and felt increasingly like an outsider. Her rent-stabilized apartment was one of a remaining few and she joked that it was her inheritance, a shaky one. Her mother had left it to her when she moved to Los Angeles and Laurel had lived there with her ever since.

  Dawn worked at a gift shop just blocks from the apartment. The awning was pink and dirty. It read SMALL WONDERS in two-foot black letters. The store was kitschy and cramped, shelves packed with a rainbow of plastic miniatures and gag gifts: eight balls, Kewpie dolls, and Jesus bobble heads, along with depressingly retro East Village–themed goods like CBGB T-shirts and mugs made to look like the iconic Happy to Serve You coffee cups of the nineties. It made Dawn grimace to sell these fragments of her past. After a few snide comments, she had been stationed permanently at the back of the store, behind a long glass case featuring the higher-end goods: watches, jewelry, and cuff links, mostly.

  The other girl who worked there didn’t say anything when Dawn came through the door, nor did she look in Dawn’s direction. She was tall and somewhat beautiful the way still and quiet people can be. Her name was Sylvia and her quietness was a radiant sort, one flaming with anger. Dawn forgot she was there for long stretches of time. Then suddenly Sylvia would speak.

  “You have a really bad memory,” she said when Dawn couldn’t remember the price of a ceramic gnome. Sylvia stood with her arms crossed, watching Dawn’s face squirm.

  Sylvia was right. Dawn couldn’t retain any of the prices. Nor could she answer anyone’s questions about the merchandise. Did the watches have warranties? Were all the clocks made in China? She had no idea.

  But Dawn didn’t believe she had a bad memory. Not really. She just had a way of protecting her mind from all the boring details of daily life. If something didn’t leave a blazing impression, it was immediately ejected from her cruising brain.

  Her curiosity was reserved for more captivating subjects, like all the customers in their hats and gloves, shuffling around in a grabby trance. She loved watching them. She loved that it was part of her job, monitoring everyone to see if they needed help or if they were stealing. It seemed there was no other place where this sort of staring was acceptable.

  Christmas was a few weeks away but still the customers dawdled, browsing to no end. “It’s like a petting zoo for capitalism,” Dawn smirked. But Sylvia only glared in return, her arms tightly crossed. Dawn’s smile faded. She was parked in her usual spot behind the glass case and the aspirin was wearing off. She stood perspiring under the hot white lights, her hair getting shiny and limp.

  Dawn was supposed to meet her father that night for dinner and she kept picturing herself at the restaurant, the horrible silence pounding between them. She pictured herself saying: “I want to meet my family.” She repeated the words in her mind several times, until they felt like a prayer. She had wanted to meet her father’s side of the family since she was a child but he had always refused her in a vague sort of way, saying he would think about it or just staring for a long time before changing the subject. She was sure his family didn’t know she existed. It seemed no one knew. At his sixtieth birthday party, Dawn had shocked an entire roomful of his friends. “I had no idea he had a daughter,” they all exclaimed, which in retrospect seemed rude. They should’ve lied, Dawn thought.

  She looked around the room and tried to guess which customers were fathers. Then, as if summoned by her thinking, one approached her. He brought his open wallet onto the glass counter and took out a small photo of a very pretty brunette, then handed it to her. “That’s my daughter,” he said while staring blankly at the jewelry, like a dog looking at a television. “What do you think she would like?”

  “She’s very pretty,” Dawn said, lingering too long with the little face.

  “I know,” he said, smiling quickly.

  Dawn recommended a pair of pearl studs and he stared at them. She held one pearl up to her earlobe.

  “Okay,” he said and Dawn was very moved. She almost cried. He could be a bad man, she consoled herself. But he didn’t look like a bad man.

  Dawn brought the earrings to the register, where Sylvia placed them in a white box and looped a glossy red ribbon around it, tying a tight bow on top.

  Dawn watched the tidy spectacle in a slouching daze. When the man left, Sylvia turned with a cutting stare. “What’s with you?” she said. “Are you high?”

  “No. I was just . . .” Dawn broke off. Her face had drained of all color. “I was just thinking.”

  “Well don’t.” Sylvia walked past her. “Anyone could steal from you right now.”

  • • •

  Dawn walked home weepy and disoriented, her fever breaking. When she got in the door, Laurel was sitting at the kitchen table drinking whiskey from a Batman mug. The big bottle of brown booze sat before her, uncapped and half gone. Beside it sat a fish-shaped ashtray, loaded to capacity with short and long butts. “I can’t believe you went,” she said, her enormous head swiveling in Dawn’s direction. Laurel still had her uniform on but she’d peeled her stockings off. They hung from the back of her chair.

  “I’ve only been there a week. I can’t just call in sick.” Dawn sat down and sighed. “Sylvia hates me.”

  “Who?”

  “The other girl who works there.”

  “Oh. So what.”

  “She asked if I had a drug problem.”

  “Well you do,” Laurel smirked. “But the drug is you.”

  “It’s true! I still can’t wrap gifts . . . I’m not even allowed.”

  “So what.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “You wanna be one of those strange high-octane charm machines? People who fold things really well?” Laurel sneered. “They’re nuts and stupid.”

  “But I should at least be able to—”

  “There are no intellectual slackers,” Laurel declared. “These people . . . they have no curiosity. You belong in the eighties.” She took a long drink from her mug. “You know Jim Jarmusch sold popcorn at St. Marks Theatre. He was this freaky white-haired guy. He had a pompadour.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “My mother told me.”

  Dawn pictured the eighties in lower Manhattan, lush with possibility. It depressed her. “I don’t get why artists still move here,” she said.

  “Because,” Laurel said, “they wanna drink with other smart, disappointed people.” She raised her mug. “Want?”

  “I’m sick.”

  “It’s good for that.”

  “No. I’m meeting my dad in like an hour.”

  Laurel stared coolly, then looked away
.

  Dawn watched her, knowing full well that refusing a drink was tantamount to betrayal in Laurel’s mind.

  “I thought you hated him,” Laurel said.

  “I still do. I can’t believe my mom slept with him.”

  “They’re back together?”

  “No. I mean that she ever slept with him.” Dawn tried to picture her dad as a cute younger guy. It actually wasn’t that hard. “My aunt told me my mom tricked him into impregnating her. Like, they had broken up and she went to this bar where she knew he would be.”

  Laurel poured more whiskey into the Batman mug and set it before Dawn. “You can’t trick someone into fucking you,” she said.

  “That’s what I think. It was his choice. But I guess he figured that if she got pregnant, she’d get rid of it.” Dawn hesitated, then sipped from the mug and grimaced.

  Laurel smiled. “So you’re the trick,” she said. “That makes sense.”

  “The what?”

  “I’m the mistake,” Laurel said. “My parents didn’t mean to have me.” She grinned, proud somehow. “And my brother was the gift. Because my mom didn’t really want kids but my dad did. She wanted to give him that.” Laurel smiled again. “So you’re the trick.”

  Dawn nodded. “I guess I am.”

  “You always say your dad wishes you’d never been born. So that’s why. He didn’t have a say.”

  “Well neither did I.”

  “Oh stop,” Laurel said kindly. “Thank God your mom tricked him. I mean, thank God he was at that bar.”

  “I don’t know why we have to bring God into it.”

  “Forget God. I’m just really glad your parents fucked that night.”

  “Well thanks,” Dawn laughed.

  But Laurel seemed not to hear her. She was staring just past Dawn’s ear at nothing in particular, her eyes wide. “It’s weird that some precise sexual act produced us,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s like the porn you can’t have.”

  This excited Laurel. “But what if you could?”

  Dawn stared at her, waiting for the speech she could feel burning in Laurel’s thoughts. Her enthusiasm was always this way, like a fire that begins in the basement and quickly climbs throughout the house, radiant and snarling. “I mean, what if you could see that sex?” Laurel said, obsessed. She was very erect in her chair now. “I mean what if you had that technology?”