When Watched

by Leopoldine Core

  Theo dreamt deeply of revenge, drowning the guinea pig of a girl she particularly disliked. She considered the possibility of jail time and jerked awake.

  • • •

  It was dark. She was alone and instantly furious, belly down and clammy in the clothes she had put on that morning: high-waisted corduroys and a T-shirt with a winking cartoon puppy on it. The crosstown bus hissed down her block and bars of light shot across the ceiling. She wanted so badly to sneak to her mother’s bed, to burrow her face in Linda’s warm wall of back fat. She wanted to say that her stomach hurt, even though it didn’t.

  Theo tiptoed to her mother’s bedroom and reached beneath the massive comforter, hoping to find a shoulder or hip or hand. She listened for her mother’s whistling nose. After a few seconds she realized she was alone. Theo turned on the light. Her mouth trembled as it always did before she cried, but she decided not to since there was no one there to watch.

  Theo walked to the kitchen and dumped a stack of saltines onto a plate. She swung open the refrigerator and knelt before the radiant room of batteries and yogurt, then dragged her crackers one by one across a lump of butter, dropping them in rows on the plate.

  She climbed back into her mother’s bed and turned on the television, leaning back, pleased to discover that Losing Sarah was on again. Sarah was only out of her mother’s sight for an instant before she vanished forever. Though missing photos were posted door-to-door and every townsperson with a flashlight joined the search, Sarah’s body was found jammed into the trunk of an abandoned car. Her body was never shown, only the scene of the crime, the aftermath. A dirty street in daylight, littered with the vestiges of her last living moments: a path of blood with smears from her struggling fingers, one scuffed Mary Jane the size of a potato chip, a fistful of blonde wisps blown up into the branches of a nearby tree.

  Theo’s favorite part of the film came at the end, when the kidnapper was torn from his home in handcuffs and dragged through a crowd of hysterical townspeople and news reporters. He had beady eyes and pocked cheeks, his freckled scalp protruding from a ring of frizzy red curls. Sarah’s father launched his body onto the criminal, spitting and weeping onto him, yanking his carroty hair. Theo watched fixedly as he cowered on the pavement; she felt she had participated in both his capture and his crime.

  Theo imagined where a kidnapper would hide in her apartment if he had the opportunity, if her mother left the door open. She pictured him, breathing quietly under the bed, ready to grab an ankle. How long had he been waiting so patiently? Hours and hours, she decided. Theo felt flattered that she had been chosen out of so many other gorgeous children. She wondered if it was her narrow, upturned nose or pleated jumper. Or maybe the fact that she was such a likable child, never throwing tantrums or wetting the bed. Her kidnapper was in love with her and Theo knew that his love was a kind of sickness, but she cherished this wild, wrongful affection, precisely because it could not be suppressed. Being kidnapped seemed like a compliment.

  Theo envisioned her violent capture and eventual murder. Her teeny killed body: hard and discolored with rot, propped within a ring of candles in her kidnapper’s apartment. He would be caught because he couldn’t bear to throw her away. The smell would alert the neighbors.

  Theo lifted whole crackers into her mouth, picturing her mother’s face as a private investigator leaned in with the bad news, his beefy palm on her shoulder. He would be sure to tell Linda that Theo was too good for this world and promise to keep the monster behind bars. Perhaps he would add that it must have been difficult having such a beautiful daughter, that there must have been so many other men who wanted to kidnap her, what with that narrow nose, that white-blonde hair.

  At the funeral, her mother would sit hunched over a fistful of sodden tissues, crying the way people try not to in public. Charlie would stand over Theo’s powdered corpse, lowered into a glossy casket with her teeny fingers assembled carefully on her breast, two tough curls around one long white lily. Charlie would know that his ears were too big and he smelled too much like a neglected turtle to ever be kidnapped, as he stared down at the only friend he’d ever had. And Sandy would be there too, feeling ugly in her dress.

  News reporters would barge through the crowd of inconsolable weepers, lifting their microphones to the mouths of her classmates, who said they really missed Theo and meant it. One student would read Theo’s poems aloud, poems that consisted of long, thoughtful lists of her dislikes, complete with supplementary illustrations. The sobbing kid would stand before a blown-up picture of Theo in a frame inscribed with the words WE WILL NEVER FORGET. The crowd would sit hushed by every poem, touched, nodding in unison. In a variety of ways they said God her life had been hard. Even the reporters would cry and then take breaks to fix their makeup. That night on the news, they would announce that a new law had been passed to punish particularly choosy perverts in especially merciless ways. This law would be named after Theo.

  Theo would spy on her body from heaven. And heaven was a great white sea of the similarly beautiful, the unlawfully adored, the stalked. Theo appreciated the promise of death and the dependable traditions that followed it. Everyone she had ever met would be at her funeral, leaning over her pink pleats in prayer. Not to say goodbye, but to say hello for the first time. A real hello, hello from her nose to her feet. With their eyes, they would reach into her perfect mouth, bright and quiet. They would dip into her hair and duck beneath her dress to see those purpled places, those finger-shaped bruises. They would analyze her marks to determine the size and placement of her kidnapper’s hands, to see how she had been touched. People are able to look longer at a dead girl because they do not need permission, a dead girl does not look back when watched.

  • • •

  Theo grew tired of waiting for her kidnapper and decided to go find him instead. She brushed her cracker crumbs onto Linda’s pillow and hurled the plate at the wall. She marched to her room, cramming her backpack with a blue carnival bear and a flashlight. She yanked the sheets half off her mattress and shattered her bedside Bambi lamp, swatting all the framed photos from the walls on her way to the front door.

  Theo walked up to the roof. She sat on the cool tar, petting the yellow hairs on her shins and wondering when her mother would notice she was missing. And how long would she search for her? Would she find her in time? Theo peeked down at the street, biting her fingers, to see if any cop cars were parked outside. The orange-lit avenue was dotted with nuzzling pairs of heads and Theo spat at them. She lay on the tar the way someone would to get a suntan.

  • • •

  The weak line of light streaming from Theo’s flashlight only reached so far, disappearing a few feet beyond her grasp. He could be here, she thought, tucked under a square of shadows. And if he was here, he would take her to a damp corner of land, overgrown with trees and shrubs. She closed her eyes to see him better. In the moonlight his boxy teeth beamed bright and white as hospital coats, his hairdo hung over one eye. The other eye was gigantic and blue; it knew every angle of her, towering loyally, possessed with love.

  He explained that he’d been watching her for a while, even watched her sleep by climbing up the fire escape and squatting there for hours. He said she looked great sleeping and she felt her face heat up. “I don’t snore or drool?” she asked.

  “Never,” he said, and with shy delight she looked up into his one lit-up eye. The man was dressed more to host a cocktail party than a kidnap. He wore a black bow tie. Moonlight pooled on the tops of his tuxedo shoes.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

  “I am going to put you in there.” He pointed beyond tall weeds to a lake. Every star winked, every star had the heartbeat of a tiny baby shark. He carried her into the water like a fireman from a burning building. He was sure to tell her everything she was about to feel. Like a good doctor, he described what a lungful of lake water felt like.

  Polaroids in
the Snow

  She is sitting in bed with a mug of red wine and a book. She is barely reading the book. Mostly she is thinking. Occasionally she drinks from the mug. She is thinking that she is a weak person. She is thinking that her main weakness is her fear of fighting with people. She cannot bear to fight, not with anyone, even people she hates. This means she will do anything to resolve a disagreement right away, even if it means admitting she is wrong when she is not wrong, or apologizing when she is not sorry.

  Her ex-husband was not afraid of fighting. He even seemed to enjoy it a little. She decides that this is why he always got his way.

  She pictures them in bed after an argument: her crying and him silent. Sometimes he would leave the room when he noticed that she was crying but most of the time he would remain in the room. She would heat up and stare into space and give lengthy imagined speeches. She would stay quiet and it was like being quiet while being pinched very hard. She would wait for him to speak, or to show some signs of longing for her to speak. But he showed no signs of longing and he continued not to speak.

  Often, she first broke the silence with a few soft, inarticulate sounds. Then, with mounting panic, a herd of language followed like frightened animals. She would say she was sorry and his face would morph into a gentler face. She remembers her merging sense of relief and defeat. She feels embarrassed.

  Outside it is snowing. She looks out her small window and is soothed by the great load of whiteness. One bundled man is walking slowly by, leaving a trail of dark gouges in the snow. It is coming down harder now than it was earlier, when she walked the dog. On the steps of her building someone had dropped a few Polaroids and she stopped to look at them. In one she identified an arm and half a smiling head but the other two Polaroids were entirely defaced, just marbled squares of brown and yellow.

  She wonders now if her husband was also giving imagined speeches during the silences that followed their fights. She thinks a moment and decides not. She decides that he was as detached as he appeared to be. She thinks that she would not want his skill of leaving in the presence of someone. But an instant later she realizes that this is a total lie. Because she would certainly rather be like him than like her. She would certainly rather leave than be left.

  She reads three lines in her book but doesn’t hear them. She rereads them and the words seem to dissolve. She worries, as she always worries when this happens, that she will never be able to read again. That she will be spending the rest of life trapped in a chamber of her own thoughts, just a tortured head talking to itself. But she assures herself that these voices—her voices—always die down to a static hum. Probably, she thinks, her mind will be emptied by tomorrow, like a shaggy forest after a storm, cool and dripping and still. Then, she thinks, I will be able to read.

  She puts the book down and finishes her wine. She lies on her side and begins to relax. She thinks she can only relax when she is exhausted. But she is glad to be exhausted. She likes to sleep. She likes when it comes down like an ax.

  Like Baby

  James arrived at Margo’s apartment in the early evening. He had wet hair, which she took as a compliment, since it usually looked oily, falling in sections over his forehead.

  “Hey,” he said and walked right in, looking around freely, like a prospective buyer. He wore an olive army jacket like a shirt, buttoned low, a triangle of his pale chest exposed. Margo stood and watched as he perused the bookshelf, then picked up a framed photograph of herself and her sister as kids.

  “There I am suffering.” Margo smirked.

  “This is you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have a twin?”

  “Yeah.” She secretly loved the poolside shot. The two little red-haired girls were obviously identical, but she felt that her own face blazed out of the photograph, as if her child self knew something extra. “That’s me,” she said, pointing.

  “Why did your parents buy you the same bathing suit?”

  “If we got different gifts—like even if they were just slightly different—one always seemed better and we’d get in a fight. We were kind of like dogs that way.” She paused. “It was weird though. Everyone stared at us. My mom loved it. She hated when we started looking different.”

  “What do you mean looking different?”

  “Baby got her nose pierced and bleached her hair.” Margo laughed. “It looked so bad. We were thirteen.”

  “Baby?”

  “When she was eleven she started insisting we call her that. Her real name is Kate.”

  “Weird,” he said, setting the frame back down.

  “I think she saw people saying it to women on TV.”

  He laughed. “What’s she like now?”

  Margo couldn’t think of much that had changed. At twenty-three, Baby was the same moody, protean creature. She hated sharing a face with Margo and often reasserted her desire to get a nose job once she had enough money. The two lived together but Margo had begged Baby to stay with their parents that night. “I’ll do anything,” she said and Baby groaned. But then after much coercing she packed a little bag and left.

  “Now her hair is black,” Margo said. “And she’s really smart. Probably smarter than me. The thing is, she does nothing!”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “I mean she just watches TV. And makes brilliant passing remarks.”

  He smiled. “I know those types. There’s no society for them.”

  “Yeah,” Margo grinned. “Which is fine. But now she’s on antidepressants.” Her eyes narrowed. “And I’m so against it.”

  “You liked her better when she was depressed?”

  “She didn’t seem clinically depressed to me. I mean . . . for a shut-in who does nothing but watch TV, depression seems like an appropriate response. Taking pills just seems . . .” Margo broke off. “It’s just something she’s doing to be different from me.”

  “Everyone I know is on antidepressants,” he said.

  “Yeah and they’re all on the same antidepressants,” Margo chimed. “Like, as if our insides aren’t particular.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding.

  “In fifty years we’ll look back and find these drug treatments barbaric,” Margo continued. “It’s gonna get a lot more refined, I think.”

  “Well I won’t ever take that shit.”

  “Me neither. But at a certain point we won’t have a choice. Pharmaceuticals get in the water. People flush pills and pee them out. Hormones too.”

  “Hormones?”

  “From birth control.”

  “Oh right.” He looked down at his hands. “Shit.”

  “We treat water like it’s endless,” she said. “But there isn’t much left.”

  They both tensed when she said this. Margo took a breath.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He looked at her. “It just makes me think about the apocalypse.”

  “I know. A lot of things make me think about the apocalypse,” she said, eyes wide. “I think all these women dying to get pregnant are insane.”

  “You don’t want a baby?” He looked genuinely surprised.

  “No.”

  He stared at her.

  “Why let this stranger into your body, then into your home?” she said, wishing she could stop the speech building in her mouth. “It seems mentally ill. People never talk about the fact that babies are strangers. I mean, you don’t know this person.”

  “But you love them. I mean, usually you love them right away.”

  “So why bring them to this awful place?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know. To meet them I guess.”

  This silenced Margo. She wondered if she appeared grim. James fixated on the owl wall clock and she strained to decipher his expression. The dark turn in conversation had snatched from the room the feeling
that anything could happen. Margo wondered if she had imagined the flirtation to begin with.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” James asked, pulling a pack of Marlboro reds from his shirt pocket.

  “No,” she said. Margo despised smoking but she wanted him to have it—the thing he wanted.

  James poked a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a match. “Do you wanna take the pictures?” he asked, shaking the match out.

  “Okay. We should go to my room, then,” Margo said, blazing with dread. She had forgotten all about the pictures. That was why he was there, she reminded herself.

  James sat in front of her in Oceanography—a summer class and the very last one she needed to graduate college. She was in love with him so she said she was a photographer. It was the first thing that came to mind. She said she was putting a portfolio of portraits together and would he mind posing. Then he said “Sure” and she stood there, marveling at what had just occurred.

  It didn’t feel like a total lie because she had always wanted to be a photographer. And maybe, she thought, the lie would inspire her to take photography seriously and she would develop as an artist, blow everyone away. It would be like the time she was cast in The Wizard of Oz in high school and had to learn how to sing. Now she could sing.

  In her room James began taking his clothes off without being asked to, the cigarette drooping from one side of his mouth, smoke obscuring his eyes. Margo turned on the ceiling fan and the whole room hummed. “Sorry,” she said. “The air conditioner’s broken.”

  James shrugged. He stood naked by the white brick wall. “Tell me what to do,” he said and tapped ash into one cupped hand. It was shocking.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a mug. He promptly squashed the cigarette out and lit another, his dick hanging frankly. Margo blushed as she held the camera. Helplessly she glanced at herself in the mirror—that fearful, horny person.

  “Mark of the devil,” her grandfather had said to her once while drunk, petting her red hair.