Don't Cry

by Mary Gaitskill

  The ragged man approaching her on the street could see all of this from almost a block away. Significant pieces of his soul had been missing for years, and his endless search for them had caused his normal sense of sight to grow an invisible, voracious eye, which tirelessly scanned places most people would not wish to see. He saw her emptiness sucking at everything around it. He saw her open heart, full of feeling and pouring it all out. Emptiness and fullness, pulling in and pouring out with equal and opposite force, gave her an extraordinary psychic discharge more visible to him than the ghost lights. It made him curious. When he got close enough to see her, he was even more curious; she did not look like that kind of person.

  Meanwhile, the boy was heading home in a taxi, bat girl in tow. He was in a philosophical mood. She was talking nonsense about art. That was okay with him. Her talk was like a glimmering curtain pulled back to reveal a stage with costumed people on it—and he was one of them. The curtain was moth-eaten and torn at the bottom, but that only made it better. The taxi turned down the mirror-ball street. He interrupted the girl. “Do you know why this is my favorite block in the city?”

  She looked out the window, then looked back at him. He could tell she was thinking hard about it. He looked past her out the window ; the dancing lights flirted with him and ran away. There were homeless people huddled in the dark storefront. He felt pity, plus curiosity What was it like for them? “Oh!” said the girl. “The record store?”

  In fact, the ragged man was not homeless. He had a room in a tiny rotting hotel with a hot plate, a buzzing box refrigerator, and stacks of magazines piled up against a wall. People assumed he was homeless because he stank and was ragged, because he asked for change, and because he was empty like the girl. His soul hadn't been stolen; he had lost it, gradually, over a period of years. He had lost much more than she had. Unlike hers, his soul had been connected to his heart. Because his heart had been deranged by the loss, he'd tried to call back his soul by opening his mind. It didn't work, and he had been without so much of his soul for so long that his open mind was like a gaping wound. His openness had made him wise, but it was not a wisdom he could do anything useful with. His mind hurt him all the time, and the constant hurt made him full of pity for everything that hurt. But because his pity came through his mind, it translated as a thought disturbance rather than feeling, and so was hard to express. He stood before the kneeling girl full of sympathy he couldn't feel and didn't know how to express.

  “Do you want money?” she asked.

  “Could you help me out?” He hadn't known what else to say Reflexively he extended his hand.

  “Um, hold on.” She opened her purse and pawed through it. Absently, she wondered if the man might rob her. She found her wallet, pulled a dollar from it, and handed it up to him. He took it and paused, as if trying to decide what to do. The circle of whirling lights enclosed them like a spell cast long ago and forgotten, all the force gone out of it but still haunting its spot. He was trying to remember how to talk to girls.

  “That's all I can give,” she said. “I'm not rich.”

  He saw she had no idea what was happening to her. Even if he could talk to her, she would not be able to answer. Sorrow and loneliness roared through him—so much force that came to nothing. He decided to try anyway. “You aren't what you think,” he said.

  “I don't know what I am,” she answered.

  You are a sack of things without a sack, he thought, but the thought sped by too fast. “Six farts going off in a bag,” he said. “Broke the bag and fell out.”

  She gave a short, nervous laugh. Making a girl laugh—that was good. Grateful for her laughter and wanting very much to help, he decided to show her what was inside him. If you had been looking at him, you would've seen him open his coat and stand as if he were sexually exposing himself. But that gesture was symbolic. Hoping that the girl would have eyes to see, he made his coat the cover for his daily self and, in opening it, revealed the disfigurement of his soul. He did it like a leper might stand in mute greeting before another leper. He did it to show understanding and also to warn.

  Her personality didn't see, let alone recognize, what she had been shown; her personality just saw a homeless guy holding his coat open. But beneath her personality her soul saw what he was showing and shrieked in fear. A block away, the missing piece came awake so suddenly that the other souls trapped in the room with it started and stirred, like restive animals. Do not let that happen, it signaled her. Do something—now! NOW!

  At that moment, the boy and his guest walked into his room. Even though the boy was drunk, he was sensitive enough to feel the agitation present there. Not guessing what it was, he mistook it for his own excitement, and he thought he was more attracted to this girl than he was. The girl felt it, too, but, likewise, mistook it for the intensity of the boy himself. Within moments, they were stretched out on his bed, kissing. This girl had no intention of revealing her soul. But in the charged atmosphere of the room, she couldn't hold it back altogether, and it floated to her surface, where he could feel it, just under her skin, delicious and tantalizing. She closed her eyes and arched her neck, and he saw the subtle beauty of her eyebrows, the elegant bone of her nose, the down that covered her face. He felt like he loved her, even though he knew he didn't.

  The ragged man sighed and closed his coat. He thought he saw a flicker of recognition, but she just sat there, staring at him. He tried another approach.

  “Why don't you go home?” he asked. “You shouldn't be out here.”

  “I'm waiting for someone.”

  “Oh,” he said. “A … boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  His memory became a tunnel of girls, and he fell down it. Some of them were shouting angrily, others were indifferent, and some were laughing with happiness and kissing him with warm, live mouths. One was crying because she was pregnant and too young to have a baby. He sighed again. Now here was this one before him, pert and pretty and torn down the middle. Of course this boyfriend had something to do with her predicament, but what could he do about it? He gave up. “Well,” he said, “don't wait too long, sweetheart.”

  “I won't,” she said. She watched him walk down the street, hunched as if subtly crippled. There was a drunk scream from the next block over, and she heard it as a refrain: Do something—now! Now! She took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the boy's number.

  When he picked up the phone, a dark little silence followed his hello and he knew who it was. “Hello?” he said again. The girl on the bed propped her head up with her hand and looked at him. Wonderful: her deep eyes and her blunt-tipped nose and the sharp angle of her elbow.

  “We have to talk,” said the voice from the phone.

  At the sound of it, her captive soul unfurled itself again, and a wave of urgency passed through the room.

  “It's four in the morning,” he said.

  “I know. We need to straighten some things out.”

  “Well, we can't do it now. I have company.” Her soul rolled through the room, crashing like Rip van Winkle's ninepins. He couldn't hear it, but his soul, which was getting nervous, roughly and quickly translated it to his mind as Give me back my Golden Arm!

  “You treated me like shit!” cried the girl.

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said. “I treated you like you treated me.”

  She didn't say anything. She gazed at the new place inside her, longing to enter it with him. She thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.

  He sensed the new place, but he didn't see what it had to do with him. He sighed. “Call me tomorrow and we can talk,” he said. “But right now, I'm busy” He hung up and the ninepins crashed again as her soul flung its full weight against the prison door inside him. The girl on the bed sat like an alert cat, sensing an invisible war.

  “An old girlfriend?” she asked.

  “No, just somebody I went out with once.”

  Give me back my Golden Arm!

&nb
sp; “I hope she's not a stalker,” he added. He sat on the bed; his guest sat up and watched him intently Deep inside him, deeper than dreams, a drum was beating. It had taken several hours for the girl's call for help to filter down to the bottom of the boy's soul; it had just now gone through the prison wall and reached the prisoner inside. He recognized her voice instantly He rose and gripped the handle of the prison door. With all his strength, he pulled from the inside while the female pushed from the outside. The boy's inmost foundation began slowly to rock. Debris was loosed. The pit was disturbed.

  “Do you want me to go?” asked the tattooed girl.

  “No,” he said. He meant it; he didn't want to be alone.

  The girl lay against the storefront door, her open lips pressed against the tiny, hateful phone, her eyes closed, her face knit tight with pain. Day was coming. In the shallow dark, the mirror-ball lights swarmed biliously Her heart felt swollen and grotesque, as if it were taking over her whole body, including her head. Her mind felt nearly gone. But the ragged man had helped her after all. Because a tiny bit of her had seen what he showed and had the sense to fear it, she made herself stand up. “Don't wait too long, sweetheart,” she muttered through her teeth. “Don't wait too long, sweetheart.” She imitated the ragged man's voice as she walked home, hunched in the cold and nearly growling.

  The girl from the bar was naked before the boy, as he was before her. She had the turgor of a healthy plant, dense with moisture, so aroused that she was already lost in it. Her soul moved beneath him, luxuriantly turning in her fecundity The crashing inside him was matched by the hard, socketed joining of their bodies; he pushed from the outside, she from the inside. Deep things were roused and driven toward the surface: Bits of primary matter joined with feeling, memories, and dreams swarmed upward like bats from a dark shaft. The girl beneath him released her own darkness like a wave of perfume. Overwhelmed without knowing why, the boy pressed into her body as if for refuge. She gave it to him, hot and jumping. Her little demon consorts punched their fists in the air and cheered. He let go of everything but the feeling of her body and the sight of her face, her lips parted just enough to show a sliver of teeth. The prison broke. The boy had a sensation of flying as his freed soul shot up and up and up. The boy rolled off the girl, so moved that he nearly passed out. He touched her face with astonished fingers. “Who are you?” he whispered. She smiled. His awe was misplaced, but that scarcely mattered.

  Between sleep and wakefulness, he remembered the soul of the girl he'd taken and thrown away; it was like you might suddenly remember something strange that you'd done during a blackout drunk. He got up to look for it, and, to his amazement, bumped into several others before he found it. It was clear what was called for—and yet, as he looked at them, he realized he had grown attached. He had to sit for some moments, just looking at them— Gentleness, Forbearance, Instinct, and Ardor—before he could herd them into the hall and out the door. Perhaps some of them were attached to him, too, for, once outside, instead of dispersing right away, Forbearance and Gentleness clustered at the door, giving off an air of doelike confusion.

  But the intrepid soul attached to the brain of the girl who had knelt under the mirror ball that night did not hang around. As soon as he released it, it made a beeline toward its proper owner, who was mercifully still asleep, and so was spared the strange sensation of reentry. The window of her heart was just open enough for it to slip in.

  Almost a year later, they passed each other on the street. They might have tried to avoid meeting, except that neither recognized the other until it was too late. This was because the appearance of both had been subtly altered. Each of them was vaguely aware that the other had changed, but neither suspected that the other had a thing to do with it. Each merely recognized the other as an enemy with whom they were no longer at war, and they both had tentative, tolerant eyes that said, I like you fine as long as you don't start anything. They said, Hi, how are you?” on the approach and “Good!” on the way past. Both of them turned to look at each other, got caught, and quickly turned back. Neither of them saw their souls, unfurled in the sun and glimmering at each other with recognition and regard.

  Today I'm Yours

  I dreamed of Dani only once that I can remember, but it was a deep, delicious dream, like a maze made of diaphanous silk, or a room of hidden chambers, each chamber nested inside the previous one—except that according to the inverse law of the dream, each inner chamber was bigger, not smaller, than the last.

  In the dream, I was alone on the streets of Las Vegas, surrounded by speeding traffic and huge streaming lights advertising monstrous casinos. There were thousands of people pouring in and out of the monstrous advertised mouths, but I didn't know any of them. I went to my hotel. The walls of its lobby were made of artificial forest, with animals and birds moving inside them. I went to my room; its walls seemed to shift and flux. Dani came out of the bathroom wearing a leopard-print minidress and black high-heeled shoes. The room stirred as if surprised; though she sometimes wore lipstick, Dani never wore a dress or high heels. She wore pants and clunky boys’ shoes; she liked her lovers to wear dresses. But in the fluxing chamber of my dream, she walked toward me with a leopard-print dress purring on her haunches. Her slender little body was like a cold-blooded eel with electricity inside it; her movements, too, had the blithe, whipping ease of an eel traveling in deep water. But her flashing eyes were human. She came toward me as though she were going to kiss me, but instead she walked past me, opened a door in the wall, and disappeared. I looked out the window and saw cities and countries; I even saw private rooms in other countries; I saw things that had happened hundreds of years ago. But I couldn't see Dani, even though she was inside my room.

  A week later, I was walking down the street in Manhattan, and there she was. It was during the first autumn of the Iraq war. It was a time of decay and disillusion. On the newsstand, a magazine cover read why we haven't been hit again: ten reasons to feel safe—and scared. In the middle of town, a building fell down and crushed people to death, and before sadness, there was relief that it was merely more decay, and not terrorism. A bus stop advertisement for bras read who needs inner beauty? and someone had written across it in black marker you do asshole.

  I was carrying wine and fuchsia flowers, and the flowers nervously waved their wobbling fingers over the top of my bag. It was a humid afternoon and the air was heavy with the burnt tang of fresh-laid asphalt and hot salted nuts. I walked past a wall layered with many seasons of damp movie posters; the suggestion of a circus seeped up under the face of an actress, until a torn half tiger leapt, roaring, through the hoop of her eye. Loud, clashing music poured out car windows and ran together in a muddy pool of sound, with a single bell-like instrument sparkling in and around the murk. I looked up, my mind suddenly tingling with a half-remembered song, and there she was, looking at me. An eerily smiling beggar wandered between us, jiggling the coins in his cup, and I remembered that when we first met, she had put her finger on my sternum, lightly run it down to my navel, and turned away “Hello, Ella,” she said.

  She was on her way home from her job as an editor of a small press distinguished mainly by its embroilment in several lawsuits. I was preparing for a dinner party my husband was giving for some pleasant people who had once been well regarded in bohemian literary circles. She knew I was married, but still, when I said the word husband, she let contempt touch her eyes and lips. We clasped hands and I kissed her cool, porous cheek. Dani used contempt like a clever accessory, worn lightly enough to beguile and unsettle the eye before blending into otherwise-ordinary clothing. I've never seen her without it, though sometimes it fails to catch the light and flash.

  During the last ten years, we've met several times like this. When we first met, nothing was like this. That was fifteen years ago. I had just published a book that was like a little box with monsters inside it. I had spent five dreary years writing it in a tiny apartment with a sink and a stove against one wall
and a mattress against the other, building the box and its inhabitants out of words that ran, stumbled, posed, and pirouetted across cheap notepaper like a swarm of hornets were after them. I neglected my family. I forgot how to talk to people. I paced the room while feverish tinny songs poured from a transistor radio with a broken antenna and fantasized about the social identity that might be mine if the book were to succeed.

  I did not realize I had made monsters, nor how strong they were, until the book was published and they lifted the roof off my apartment, scaled the wall, and roamed the streets in clothes I never would've worn myself. Everywhere I went, it seemed, my monsters had preceded me, and by the time I appeared, people saw me through their aura. This could've worked for me socially; monsters were and always will be fashionable. But in my mind, my monsters and I were separate. Painful and complicated situations arose, and I lacked the skill to handle them with finesse. I left the monsters behind and moved to California, where I rented a cottage in a canyon heavily grown with trees. I purchased a rug with large, bright polka dots on it and a red couch, on which I sat for hours, hypnotized by the prize of my new social identity It was an appealing thing and I longed to put it on—but when I did, I couldn't quite make it fit. Hesitant to go out in something so ill-fitting, and uncertain how to alter it, I stayed home with the cat, who accepted my private identity as she always had.

  Back in New York, several new acquaintances became concerned. They gave me the names of people I might introduce myself to in San Francisco, and one day I took the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge to meet one of them. The warm, dim, creaking old coach traveled low on its haunches, half-full of adults heavily wrapped in their bodies and minds, plus light-limbed, yawping teens, bounding and darting even as they sat in their seats. On the highway, the bus accelerated, and with a high whinging sound, we sprouted crude wings and flew across luminous bay on humming bridge, between radiant, declaiming sky and enrapt, answering sea, flecked with flying brightness and lightly spangled with little tossing boats. We barreled along a winding avenue thickly built with motels (the stick-legged ball of a smiling sheep leaping over the words comfort inn still leaps somewhere in my brain) and squat chunks of fast-food stores. The distant ocean flashed and brimmed at intersections. We turned right, climbed a hill; at the top, fog boiled through the air on wings of mystery and delight. Down the hill, lit slabs of business rose up into the coming night. Floods of quick, smart people surged along with the hobbled and toiling; the felled sat beached and stunned against buildings in heaps of rags. Turn and turn again. Glancing out the window, I saw a strip club with a poster on its wall featuring one half-naked girl walking another on a leash. The leashed girl looked up and raised a paw in a patently ironic expression of submission and desire. I was meeting Dani in a neighborhood of bars and old burlesque clubs, a place of cockeyed streets like crooked mouths lined with doors like jack-o’-lantern teeth. The fog lolled in the sky, sluggish as a fat white woman on rumpled sheets. I was in a place where people dressed up as monsters, and after going to so much trouble to make them, I'd left mine behind. Feeling small and naked, I walked under big neon signs: a naked woman, an apple, a snake. It was not frightening. It was a relief to feel small and naked again.