When Watched

by Leopoldine Core

  “What technology?”

  “It would be like a solution,” Laurel said carefully. “Made from a plant discovered in Brazil or somewhere.” She paused, piecing the trembling bits of her fantasy together. “And when you applied it to your skin, it would reveal that your cells were taking pictures all the time. So your skin had a memory of its whole long photo shoot. Even of events that predated the body.”

  Dawn smiled. She looked down at the empty mug in her hands and refilled it, almost to the brim. “And how would they discover that the plant did all this?” she asked, smiling.

  “Well because everyone who came into contact with it—like whole villages—were having these strange dreams. And it was always the same dream.” Laurel had a sleazy grin now. “The scene of their conception.”

  “You’re such a fucking pervert.”

  “And once they created the solution it would become like a business. People would pay to see the sex that spawned them. All porn would become this . . . specific past,” Laurel said slowly. “And eventually it would even take the place of having sex.” She lit a cigarette giddily and expelled a cloud of smoke. “It would be called Pornogenesis,” she said with satisfaction. “Everyone would go to these little booths that were actually kind of like spas. And afterward they would sit out front in robes and share about their Pornogenesis. The slang term would be ‘the hitch.’ People would be like, so how was your hitch?”

  “You have the face of a fanatic, you know that.”

  “I do know that.” Laurel took a long smug drag, reacquainting herself with the exquisite distance just past Dawn’s ear. “And people could also see each other’s hitch,” she said, tapping a long column of ashes into the crowded ashtray. “You could see the sex that spawned celebrities. Even Hitler. They’d figure out how. And eventually you’d pay to get yours blocked.”

  Dawn glanced at her phone. “Shit,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Oh come on,” Laurel whined, clearly hurt to be abandoned mid-epiphany.

  “I’ll be late!”

  “You’re always hurrying somewhere awful.”

  “I completely agree.”

  “Are you really gonna go share a meal with that fucker?”

  “I have to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “You know.”

  Laurel nodded. A long plume of smoke exited her mouth. “What exactly did he say the last time you asked to meet them?”

  “He’s never given me a straight answer. Once he said he’d think about it.” Dawn drained the Batman mug. “He obviously doesn’t want me to meet them.”

  Laurel nodded. “Okay. Just . . .” She stubbed her cigarette out, wedging it in with all the rest. “Just don’t be too nice to him.” She fingered a fresh cigarette from her pack. “You’re too goddamn nice.”

  • • •

  Dawn’s dad sat at a square wood table in a sushi restaurant, the light of a white paper lantern cast over him. His smile was purely muscular as he waved to her. It lacked the radiant tones of love. Not because he didn’t love her, Dawn decided as she walked toward him. But because his love lived somewhere underground, like a deformed animal raised in pitch darkness—tortured. What was done to you? she wondered.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, unwinding her nubby black scarf. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks and nose very pink. Panting slightly, she hung her coat over the back of the chair and sat down.

  Dawn had enjoyed being drunk on the walk over, but now, sitting across from her father, she had to strain to keep his face from swirling. “How are you?” she asked, mopping her neck with her sleeve.

  “My feet are killing me,” he said. “I have bruises on my soles. They won’t heal cause I can’t afford to take off work.” He eyed her response and she was careful not to give one.

  “For them to heal I can’t be standing all fucking day,” he clarified.

  “That’s horrible,” she said flatly. Her father always opened with an illustration of his poverty. It was to Dawn’s mind a method of discouraging any requests for money, which angered her. She wondered if his feet really hurt and decided that they probably did. But the story still stank of cowardice. “My feet hurt all the time,” she said after a moment of silence. “I wonder if I get that from you.”

  This suggestion of their totemic connectedness seemed to alarm him. “I don’t think so,” he commented. “They never hurt when I was younger.”

  “My feet kill. I have a new job. I’m standing all day,” she said.

  “Well I’m sorry.”

  The waitress appeared and they each ordered without having looked at the menu. He ordered only an Asahi beer. She ordered three different sushi rolls, suddenly ravenous and desperate to sponge up some of the circulating booze in her gut.

  They exchanged more information about the parts of their bodies that hurt. His upper back, her lower back. His knee, her molar. By the end of the list they both sat blazing with self-pity.

  Using her fingers, Dawn smeared wasabi over her tuna roll, then squeezed lemon over it. She loaded one into her mouth and swallowed after only a few chews. “I’m still working on the collection of stories,” she said, knowing full well he wouldn’t have asked. “It’s coming along really well.”

  “That’s good,” he said absently, staring past her shoulder at a woman coming through the door. “Have you read Moby-Dick?”

  “No. You’ve asked me before and I said the same—”

  “Talk about a good book,” he said. “That’s what you should be reading.”

  She looked at his nose. There was a tiny black hair sprouting from the tip of it. “I want to meet your family,” she said.

  For an instant he looked frightened and it made him look younger. Then he turned back to stone.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this again. I mean . . . I’m embarrassed.” She looked down at her food. “And I don’t want to hate you.” She fixed her eyes on him and they stared at each other for what felt like minutes.

  “I’m really not in touch with any of my brothers,” he said finally, severing eye contact. “I wouldn’t even know how to call them.”

  “That isn’t true . . .” She folded her arms and began shaking her head. “You’re lying to me!”

  Everyone in the restaurant turned and stared.

  “Calm down,” he whispered sharply, nervously, like a criminal.

  Dawn didn’t calm down but she fell silent. She stood up and put her coat on.

  “What are you doing?” He looked astonished. “Hey, now hold on.”

  The moon was low and yellow and Dawn walked without looking back, salt crunching under her boots. She ran through a red light and a taxi almost killed her. The driver stopped the car and yelled “Moron!” but Dawn kept running. She passed snowy rows of roped-up Christmas trees, wreathes with gold bells and fat red ribbons and Santa heads glued on. The woman selling trees appeared suddenly in her black hat and Dawn leapt away with a scream. She skidded on some ice, toppling forward onto her hands and knees. The fall was so shocking that she remained dog-like for a long moment before raising herself up.

  “Are you alright?” the woman in the black hat asked.

  Dawn didn’t dare look at her. “I’m fine,” she said, almost meanly, sinking her injured hands into her pockets. She walked off with tears in her eyes, burping up fish and whiskey all the way home.

  • • •

  Laurel was on the sofa reading, a blue granny-square blanket over her legs. She threw it off the instant Dawn appeared. “What happened?”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh he’s a fool,” Laurel said, dashing over. “The only thing he got right was you.” She held Dawn tightly. “And he doesn’t know it. He can’t bear to know it.”

  “I’m just tired of caring,�
� Dawn croaked. “I mean why do I care so much? Is this the human condition?”

  “For some people.” Laurel grinned. “And then there are the people who just kill people. They care about other things.”

  Dawn laughed a little. “I have to lie down,” she said, resuming her pained, vacuous expression.

  “Okay.” Laurel hesitated. “Do you wanna sleep in my room?”

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  Dawn forced herself to drink a full glass of water and went to bed, where she lay watching the room pulse and felt she might puke. But the burpy, seafaring feeling soon morphed to one of complete paralysis. Dawn was nailed down, her mind pouring with cartoons.

  Laurel stepped in to turn the light off. When she shut the door, Dawn woke with a jerk. She stared into the darkness and a swell of noises built up around her, rock music and an ambient collision of voices. She thought it was the neighbors but when she closed her eyes, she realized the noises were coming from inside her head. And she saw something: a darkened room full of people. It was a bar, she realized. Everyone was talking or dancing, a dim red light pressing down on them.

  They were only vague shapes, a whole swarm of them. When Dawn focused on a single face, it moved away too quickly—ecstatically—to the beat. It was almost frightening, their thumping joy. Everyone was moving. Everyone was out of focus. Everyone but Dawn’s parents. And in that moment she knew. Even before her mother spotted her father in the crowd, she knew she was watching the night of her conception.

  Her mom stood at the bar, staring at her dad from across the room. She wore a strong-shouldered blazer, her short hair bleached white. When he waved, she strode over to him. His friends stepped away as she approached, almost as if they were afraid of her. Then he grinned sheepishly. He seemed to be wearing eyeliner. He handed her his beer and she took a long drink, handing it back with a carnal smile. They were so young and thin, Dawn observed. So attractive. Her mom tucked a strand of her dad’s hair behind his ear. She said he looked good. Then she kissed him. It was a greedy, penetrating kiss and he accepted it, clutching her jaw.

  Dawn was wary of these visualizations. They felt imported, not of her design: real. The mouth of history was opening. This is no dream, she thought.

  Again her mom kissed her dad and then drew her mouth away, as if to see the effect. He looked ambivalent suddenly. He rubbed his chin.

  Her mom hardly blinked. She smoldered with certainty, her body tipping toward him, offering itself. It didn’t seem like a trick. It seemed like love. Her mom had damp eyes and a muscular mouth. It was a beautiful combination of will and passion, Dawn thought.

  Her dad said nothing but his face was a mess of feeling. His hands moved oddly over her mom’s body, almost appraisingly. God, Dawn thought. He has never been able to express himself. But then she realized he was. He always had been. Even in 1986. His face said everything he couldn’t.

  When Watched

  Theo wanted to run away. She crouched beside the cafeteria garbage can and planned her disappearance, eating a jelly sandwich and then a cookie, quickly so that no one could ask for a piece. She pictured her mother Linda sobbing onto a pillow, waiting for the phone to ring, expecting the worst. And then begging on her hands and knees for God to bring her daughter back, even though Linda had never shown any interest in God. On TV people who asked God for things were in jail or they had cancer. They seemed desperate to Theo and she took great pleasure in pitying them. Theo envisioned her classmates praying too. Even the mean ones, and in her mind they were made tender by grief. She couldn’t hear their prayers but she could see them. For them praying was the act of remembering everything she had ever done in public. Theo licking a popsicle. Theo drawing a monkey on lined notebook paper. Theo in denim overalls with her arms folded, refusing to recite times tables in front of the class.

  Theo felt buzzed. She sauntered past a long line of kids waiting with orange trays. Then past exhausted lunch ladies who leaned with big drippy spoons over vats of hot meat in sauce. Theo sat with a thud next to Charlie, a gentle boy with long dirty hair and a runny nose. He gulped from a small red carton of milk and then slammed it down on the beige Formica table, gasping for breath and then coughing.

  “I have a boyfriend,” Theo announced, chewing her index finger. She could say anything; she would be gone soon.

  “I thought I was your boyfriend.”

  “Well you’re not.” She spread her hands flat on the sticky table. “He comes to my house every day,” she said and Charlie leaned in, pawing his nose, entranced by her certainty. “Then we you know,” she said, though Charlie didn’t and neither did she. Theo understood sex as a session of spirited naked wrestling that took place when a man with wild charm talked a woman into his room. Women on TV didn’t like sex. They were never ready unless they had been molested by their uncle or their brother when they were kids. And then their whole sense of readiness was thrown off kilter and they said yes to everyone. Theo couldn’t wait to be not ready, to say no please no and be savagely undressed.

  She sat thrilled by her fib, eyes darting around the cafeteria. Theo didn’t like to talk to anyone besides Charlie but she felt free to look long and hard at anyone she pleased. Charlie stared at his food, mystified, letting mucus run into his mouth. “Do you kiss?” he asked and took a big bite of fish patty.

  “Yes.”

  “Kissing is fostrup,” Charlie whispered through his food.

  “What?” Theo demanded.

  “Fostruppuz.”

  “I can’t hear you!” Theo jabbed him in the ribs and his bowed face shot up.

  “Kissing is for strippers!” he blurted and then looked back down at his food. Theo considered this. She imagined a stripper kissing a fully dressed man with her tongue. The two were quiet for a while.

  “My mom doesn’t want you to come over anymore,” Theo said.

  “Why?”

  “Because she really hates you a lot,” she said and watched him want to cry. He breathed heavily through his open mouth, which smelled like cloudy goldfish water. His mother Sandy never closed her mouth either and Theo hated when she got close, filling the air between their faces with gross little wafts of whatever she had eaten that day. Sandy was barrel-shaped with boobs like elf shoes. She had a stripe of hard black hairs above her lips and Theo couldn’t help but stare. “Why do you have a mustache?” she had blurted one night during dinner at their house, though she really wanted to say: “You have a mustache.” She had been pleased with her choice of words, knowing that insults from children were always more forgivable when posed as questions. Who did Sandy think she was, with her prickly whiskers and stained sweaters, stinking up the dishes and the air and her own son? Theo felt that someone had to embarrass her. Someone had to let her know who she was.

  “When you get older, you get hair in all kinds of places. Just you wait. It’s perfectly normal,” Sandy assured with a huge hard smile and set her fork down as if to keep from using it violently. Theo eyed the little hairs all night, as they twitched like roach legs with each bite. She pushed her spinach into careful gray islands and spoke only to the mustache when she asked Sandy to bring her home.

  • • •

  Theo sat bent over a blue egg crate full of dirty plastic toys when Linda appeared in the doorway. Her mother often stopped and stood in the doorway but rarely did she go into Theo’s room. She stopped to make sure Theo wasn’t dead or destroying something valuable and then left.

  “What are you doing?” she asked the backside of her daughter.

  Without turning, Theo pointed to a facedown rag doll.

  “She had sex with her best friend’s husband,” Theo said, gnawing the stiff lesions around her fingernails. “Her best friend came home and they were taking a bubble bath with candles. She said I knew it you bastard and got a divorce.”

  “I need you to zip me.” Linda walked to the front of her daughter
. She knelt in a backless green dress that brought out the veins on her breasts. Theo raised the zipper to the base of her spine. Her mother was sweating; she always radiated heat before she went out at night.

  “Don’t trash my room while I’m gone,” she said and Theo stiffened, glowing with panic. But this was the sort of fright she enjoyed. Because Linda rarely snapped and Theo wished she would more often. Her mother had a maddening way of composing herself quietly, sitting in bed touching her hair instead of slapping her daughter. Theo tried to imagine the places her mother went at night and who she showed her underwear to. Men sometimes slept at the apartment and in the morning Theo stared, amazed by how comfortable these strangers were in her house. They winked at her while gathering their belongings or sipping coffee. One man gave her a handful of coins and pocket dirt. He said she was a very serious child and could one day make a fine judge if she cared to.

  Those mornings her mother was a hideous flirt, letting her robe fall from one shoulder, her whole body blushing. She would stand at the stove scrambling eggs and fondling her weird dangly earrings, sometimes glancing over one shoulder, grinning.

  And Theo would eat her cereal solemnly. She hated her mother’s controlled tone and hoped something would disrupt it. Maybe a forearm burn at the stove or an unrestrained fart. But nothing like this ever happened. Linda maintained her measured display of arousal. Maybe she had been molested as a child. Theo thought yes, certainly.

  Linda patted her high hump of gelled hair and Theo pressed her face down onto her mother’s lap. She tried to be her heaviest self, to be immovable, but Linda pulled one hand through her hair and she softened. Linda carried her to bed and sat running her fingernails up and down Theo’s back. Theo hated how she could be wooed into a relaxed state so easily. She fell asleep enraged.