“Mother, I want you to know that despite all that’s happened, you’ll always be my mother, and I love you.”
She seemed to possibly absorb this. Her fingers fidgeted with her rat-tail necklace. “I can’t believe they did away with television,” she said. “I really didn’t see that coming at all.”
* * *
I get up in the early hours of morning, dress, and start toward the exit pod. Suddenly the shadow of the doorway takes form and I feel a grave disruption in my breathing that gives way to unmistakable pain. Mother, wearing an eye patch donned for purely aesthetic reasons, is holding a homemade knife. As she pulls the blade from my chest, I see that it has been whittled from a tin pork-n-beans can. Its label is still partially on.
Knowing I have just minutes, perhaps seconds to live, I don’t dabble in the muck of blame or anger. Circle of life, I decide. Mother giveth, Mother taketh away. But I can’t live with Brady thinking that perhaps I’d gotten cold feet, or worse, never loved him at all. I use my last remaining strength to scrape toward the WordCall console.
To my surprise, it is already lit up. There is a message between us, except the words are not my own.
FluidTransfer69: You better hurry up and do it. Plain Jane’s getting ready to bolt.
CargoBabe: Consider it done. I love you, “Brady.”
FluidTransfer69: I love you, Sicko.
“Sorry to burst your bubble.” Mother hoists me over her shoulder and begins walking. “He’s a steady I met back in the pen, pre-freeze. Been in wait ever since for an opportunity to spring me. Former felons aren’t allowed to buy permacapsules, so when he found out I’d be going up for auction he decided to get to me through you.”
The room is starting to turn a dark shade of magenta, waving at the edges like a flag of silk. Mother lowers me down and then latches something around my wrists and neck. I realize I’m in the prison capsule.
Before closing the lid, she unzips the purse on my waist and removes all my shower ration cards. From the inside of the capsule, her voice sounds echoey and godlike.
“Don’t worry, I’m freezing you, not leaving you to die. It’s just a flesh wound. But a deep one. I’m going to have to dump you somewhere that no one will find you for fifty years or so, long enough for me and Skinner, or Brady, or whatever you called him, to have a nice life together without you showing up to blow the whistle.”
With that, the cold smoke starts. It burns in a surprising way. The fact that this should not be happening to me, that Mother and my pretend boyfriend formerly known as Brady are bad people and I am not, doesn’t provide quite as much insulation from the pain as I might like. In fact, I am very cold, so cold that no one thing can be any different from another. My thoughts and my left arm are equal-sized chunks of ice. The small window of the capsule begins to frost over and I know this is my chance: this is where I get to make the face that I will have until I wake, so I open my mouth to scream. Whoever finds my capsule needs to know: something doesn’t seem right here!
But the freeze comes too fast. I see my reflection in the fogging glass, my last glimpse of consciousness, and my expression isn’t the howl of someone grievously wronged. I almost look playful, like I’m sticking out my tongue. Like this painful freeze was a snowflake to catch and eat. Like my mother was just some bad medicine to swallow.
Corpse Smoker
My friend Gizmo who works at the funeral home occasionally smokes the hair of the embalmed dead. The smell does not bother him; he is used to horrible smells. He claims that after a few minutes of inhaling, moments from the corpses’ lives flood his head like a movie. He won’t smoke the locks of children. “I did that once,” he tells me, “and I watched a dog die over and over for two days.”
“What happens if you smoke the hair of the living?” I’m a little intoxicated. I like Gizmo romantically, and I wonder if rather than having to tell him he could just smoke my bangs and figure it out.
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Maybe then I’m just breathing burnt hair. Or maybe then I’d steal their memories and they’d never get them back.”
Memory theft is a pleasant concept to me. I’ve just been through a horrible breakup with my ex-boyfriend. As it dragged itself out, I often called Gizmo at work late at night. In between tokes of hair he gave me really great advice.
* * *
The next day I decide to go to the salon and get the past fourteen months of hair chopped off. “I want the hair back,” I say, holding up a Ziploc bag. Since I knew I would feel strange requesting this, I decided to go to the Save-N-Snip, where there is a large hand-drawn sign near the register that says IF WE FIND LICE WE CANNOT CUT YOU; the wording is sinister and when I leave with my hair bagged I don’t feel like the oddest animal they’ve ever seen.
At home I worry whether other people’s strands of hair got swept in with mine. Who knows what stranger’s memories he could accidentally smoke and attribute to me? To be safe, I go through the baggie and take out anything even remotely straight: my hair is miles of curls.
* * *
When I show up at the morgue with the Ziploc bag and a lighter, Gizmo doesn’t seem too sure.
“What if I take the wrong memories?” he asks. “What if I smoke this and then you don’t even remember your name?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Wouldn’t you need toddler hair for that? This hair is all memories I can stand to lose.”
For a moment I ponder tricking him and pretending not to know anything right after he inhales. I could ask Where am I? then grab his hand with confused doe eyes.
Suddenly he gets a terrified look on his face and lowers the joint. “Have you ever owned a dog who died a slow and painful death?” Gizmo asks. “And if so, did you stand by its side the whole time in constant vigil? Because in that case we should not proceed.”
“No dogs,” I report. “Goldfish.” I make the sound of a toilet flushing.
He nods and takes a deep inhale. My head begins to feel warm and maneuvered, like certain parts of it are getting massaged. He coughs a little. “Is it working?” I ask.
“Truffles,” he says, putting his hand to his forehead like a fake psychic. “You really like truffles.” I nod; they are my favorite tuber.
The contents of my head begin to fill with motion, like water is bubbling up in my ears. Tiny popping sensations start up in my skull and grow steadily crunchier. Suddenly, Gizmo’s eyes change.
“Your ex is a jerk,” he says. This seems right, too, but when I try to come up with a specific example why, I’m left with a vague, unscratchable tickle deep in my brain. “That moron could never have given you what you want.”
All of a sudden, one of the dead bodies shakes and its hand rises up on the table. I scream and hold my bubbling head. “Don’t worry,” Gizmo says, “it’s just a death rattle.”
“Just a death rattle?” I laugh. “Do you know how disturbing that sounds?”
Gizmo, undisturbed, puffs more of my hair.
When we walk over to the rattling body, it looks vaguely familiar.
“This isn’t him, is it?” I ask. “My ex?”
“No. But I can see the resemblance.” Gizmo tilts his head to better stare at the corpse. “Same chin.” As I admire Gizmo’s hands, they take a small clump of the body’s hair between two fingers. He gives me a mischievous look. “Want to see what this guy’s life was like?”
I decline, for superstitious reasons. I figure there’s now a memory hole in my head that might take a few days—weeks, even—to fill. I worry about some other person’s memories moving in as if they were my own.
When I look over at Gizmo, he’s done with my hair joint. He’s staring at me now; still mischievous.
“What,” I ask, “spill it.” We move to a corner with a bench, and the sour smell in the air grows stronger. I put my shirt up over my nose.
“Do you think it’s wrong to postpone bodies from rotting?” I ask. “Formaldehyde and all that?”
“That’s what
happened with you and the ex. It was going badly, but you kept holding on.” His gloved hands move under my shirt a little and around my bare waist. Knowing he has just handled dead flesh creeps me out at first, but then I move closer. It’s probably a nice contrast for him. After touching a dead person, my skin must seem quite special and alive. “You know,” he says, “I’ve smoked up lots of memories of bad relationships.” He takes off a glove so he can press his bare hand to my face. “I know what not to do.”
The body behind us gives another death rattle. It startles me and I jump, but his hand stays on my face and I don’t look away. “I’ve seen good memories, too, though,” he continues. “I know how to be a good partner.”
I expect his breath to smell awful, like burnt hair, but instead it smells like Lilac Rain shampoo. I watch the fine layer of talc the rubber glove left on his hand glitter magically in the light, and the memory-hole in my brain turns hungry, then hungrier.
Eat him with kisses, the hole says; it needs to snack on a new memory right away. So we kiss, and the weird smells of the morgue suddenly turn into something tame and slippery, something our lungs can slide over like jelly, something that can hold our hearts steady through our own quiet death rattle.
Cat Owner
I invited Eddie over for dinner as a first date. I am bad at dating, which is to say, I am bad at waiting for people to fall in love with me. What is the holdup? Where is the kink in the hose?
Tonight, I’ve prepared mashed sweet potatoes. I’m nervous because they look like the diarrhea of a clown.
When Eddie knocks, Baxter begins to growl. Baxter is my large cat. His thyroid condition and back paw deformity make exercise difficult. Baxter’s growl is low when he initially spies danger, then it gets very high if the offender does not flee. Your cat sounds like a Hank Williams song, an old boyfriend once said, but he said it while leaving forever so it wasn’t a compliment the way it could’ve been.
Tonight when I open the door, Baxter slowly crawls over to Eddie’s foot and bites.
During dinner, Eddie tells me all about his job as a claims adjuster. I couldn’t care less. I don’t even eat because I’m planning on sex, and I don’t want any sloshing in my stomach or for my mouth to taste like food instead of sex. The tricky part about having sex at my apartment is Baxter, who watches on and growls while gradually crawling toward the bed, then gradually climbing up the woolly cat ramp he uses to get onto and off of the bed when I’m not home. Once he gets to the top, he approaches me and my partner and begins with the fangs. I’m so used to the biting that it doesn’t bother me anymore, not even in really sensitive areas, but past partners have freaked out at Baxter’s intimidating twenty-seven-pound figure and sideways tongue, combined with the biting and growling. I should note that by the time Baxter has finally reached the top of the bed he’s exhausted and his mouth is foamy. “Maybe it has mad cow disease,” an old fling once suggested. “He’s not a cow,” I replied, but the man was adamant. “Other things get it, goats and people and all kinds of creatures”; and when Baxter bit him the man sent me a bill for several expensive precautionary vaccinations he requested at the ER after leaving my apartment. Baxter kind of looks like the cat that’s printed on my checks, only much larger. My checks say, WHAT’S WITH MONDAYS? and the thin Baxter printed on them is very confused-looking with tousled fur. I sent the man the check for his medical expenses on a Saturday, specifically so he’d get it on a Monday and maybe like the joke enough to get back with me. He might call one day.
“This gravy is awesome,” says Eddie. That’s good news. Awesome enough to sleep with me? I want to ask, although people who have the haircut I have and wear the beige vest I wear don’t say such things. My haircut looks like the wigs men don when they want to pretend they are living in the era of Shakespeare. The bangs are totally harsh. I have wanted to tell cashiers, Slit your wrists on my bangs, harlot! when they are rude to me, especially when they give me an amused look as I’m buying prophylactics. I know what they’re thinking: that I have no use for them.
But I do. I’ve even moved Baxter’s on-ramp away from the bed tonight in preparation. He will not bite Eddie again. I might but Baxter won’t.
Except after dinner, Eddie stands, thanks me for a lovely evening, and says how much he’s enjoying getting to know me. He will not accept drink or dessert. Turns out Eddie does not imbibe alcohol. That’s okay with me, I guess: all the better for his sexual performance. Finally, I come out with it.
“I’d like you to spend the night,” I say. “If you’re afraid the cat will be an issue, don’t worry. I’ve planned around him. He will not be crawling up on the bed and biting you during intercourse.” I feel like showing Eddie my breasts. I want to show them to someone so badly; even lifting up my shirt in front of an apathetic but consenting stranger who makes an awful face afterward would be okay, would be better than this covered-up feeling that I have.
But Eddie itches his neck and says things are moving a little fast for him. He’d like to call it a night. We hug and I don’t let go as he starts walking out, but then his pace increases and I have to.
I put on my pajamas and call a pizza delivery service. Now that I know I won’t be having sex, I’m famished. I ask if they’ll please bring the pizza to me in bed. “I’m too tired to come to the door,” I say. The order taker seems wary but ultimately agrees to the delivery.
When he arrives, I flirt but he is not a bait-taker. I craftily lift up the sheets, readying to act shocked when my breasts “accidentally” expose themselves. But he seems to predict where things are going, drops the pizza, and exits the room before I have a chance. I get the pizza free of charge.
There’s a pulling sound, quiet yet slow, and I turn to see Baxter’s ramp moving back toward the bed. He is scooting it using his wide forehead. He stops once to throw up but then starts again. It is the most exercise I have ever seen him get. When he finally reaches the top of the bed, his mouth is a white sea of foam. He appears to be smiling; I watch as he lumbers to the outer crust of the pizza and takes a bite.
Cannibal Lover
I once fell in love with a cannibal on the subway. I liked his scarf and I suppose he liked something about me. Perhaps my forwardness. Our eyes locked and I immediately told him of my grandmother’s painkillers, which are first class and only given to elderly individuals who are also about to perish. “If you’re just old or just have a terminal illness you cannot get a prescription for these,” I explained to him. “Your problems must be compound and dire.” He removed his hand from the stationary pole and scratched his cheek. Something about me causes people to act itchy and uncomfortable in my presence. Perhaps my forwardness. “She never stops staring at the television. I steal them right in front of her. Maybe I should empty them into my purse in a separate room, out of respect, but I like the openness of lifting them while she’s sitting next to me. That way I can tell myself that she sees what’s going on and would say something if she wanted to.”
I’d hopped on the subway after a day at the children’s park. The park has become my favorite place to kill time because I have a lot of anxiety about dying; in fact, dying is all I think about. But when I’m around children it seems like I will someday be able to accept my own death. I observe their natural purity, the joy they derive from grass, trees, and human company, and I realize that these things would never make me joyful. So much so that I’m probably not a real person. The only thing I ever want is for something to catch on fire, both literally and metaphorically, and in this respect my death will be the universe correcting an abnormality. I also like the park because kids are easy to watch: they’re fast and loud and they never stop moving. Watching kids play is like staring at an aquarium set to “boil.” Children are safe catastrophes; they strike a balance between uncontrolled and harmless in a way that automobile accidents, tornadoes, and cannibals do not. But after an hour of kids, I either get a headache or get bored.
“You steal from your grandmother to get high,�
� the cannibal summarized, but he was nonjudgmental. His comment had the tone of an open-ended question; there was an almost therapeutic inflection in the way his pitch rose near the end of the sentence, a conversational passing of the baton.
“Pretty high.” By this point I was in the cottony stage of the pills. Everything seemed very insulated and cocoon-like, particularly my ears and head. Layers and layers of distance hugged my cheeks in a tactile, present manner. This made me quite conscious of being in the subway, in a tunnel, beneath the ground. I had an irrational fear that I was spilling stuffing everywhere, like a ripped pillow, and I kept reaching up toward my head to see if anything was actually coming out.
When the cannibal placed his hand against my hip, it felt like he was touching me through a sleeping bag. I drew in close to him. For a while we pressed against one another as though we were two halves of a mold.
“This is my stop,” the cannibal said, and although he did not ask me to follow him, I did. I played shadow and there was no speaking or eye contact. Even after we were in the building walking up to his apartment, he did not look back at me. He shut his door in my face but didn’t lock it. So I went inside.
The smell in his apartment depended on where I was standing, but I noticed that the best-smelling place was in front of a box containing several unopened bottles of bleach. Right there it smelled like the average library, a packaged scent of collection and storage. The periphery of his living room was lined with a series of padlocked chest freezers, and the soothing way they all hummed together reminded me of a dial tone. Finally he came back into the living room and handed me a glass of water with nearly twenty very small ice cubes inside.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Page 9
