by Melanie Tem
Chris twisted his body away so his dad wouldn’t feel the diamond in his pocket. Wouldn’t steal it—although he didn’t really think that was likely. Wouldn’t ask about it. Wouldn’t even know about it.
His dad had always known about the diamond; abruptly now, Chris admitted it to himself. The same way he’d known Chris had put the nail under the front tire, had shoplifted the pack of Trues. Had known stuff, but hadn’t been powerful enough to stop Chris from getting himself into more and more trouble. Had known, but hadn’t been able to fix the diamond.
Christopher pulled back from his father so roughly that he might have pushed the man away, might have been furious with him, might have been about to cry himself. He ran down the street toward his room, for a minute not exactly sure which direction it was in. He thought about throwing the diamond away while he ran, for all the good it had ever done him, but he didn’t.
That first day out of prison, Chris had managed to find a place to live, which was a relief. A hot yellow room in one of those rundown apartment buildings/hotels that hadn’t been renovated yet in lower downtown. He’d lived in a lot of those hot yellow rooms in his twenty-two years, where the sun turned the window shade brown and the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling never had a cover. There was a stove and a sink in one corner, a battered wardrobe in a second, his single bed with the stained mattress in the third, and in the fourth the door, the transom hanging open over it to let in some air and the sound of somebody’s constant fighting.
For all the ugliness of this room, for all that it looked like every other hot lonely yellow room, Christopher could see where people had tried to make little improvements: A picture from a magazine of a red flower had been taped to the top of the dresser and varnished over; it was a tacky picture and the varnish had bubbled, but he kind of liked its flash of color. In the back of the wardrobe he found white lace curtains, a little brown on the edges but still okay; when he tacked them at the window they made the sunlight seem softer.
Before he’d gone to prison, he would have thought stuff like that was stupid. Now, he had a moment of imagining that these were messages of hope from other people miserable enough, poor enough, lonely enough to have lived in this room before him. He had to remind himself that none of them had had a perfect diamond ruined forever.
Coming up and down the stairs, he had to step over drunks who smelled like vomit and pee, but he didn’t care. Every night he couldn’t sleep from the heat and the thumping next door and over his head and under his floor, but he didn’t care. He had nobody in the whole damn place to talk to but he didn’t care.
But gradually Christopher began to realize that he had neighbors. Whether he wanted to or not—and he didn’t want to—he started meeting the people who lived in the other rooms. Sometimes he’d look up at his building as he came home, and its two dozen eyes would be flapping in the winds of its dreams. In each of those windows a face would be staring back at him, a gray oval or triangle or pyramid. People whose lives had been ruined by something somebody had done to them a long time ago, and who, like him, were damaged now, imperfect.
In the room under the stairs on the first floor lived the fattest guy Chris had ever seen. He couldn’t possibly get through the narrow door; Chris thought of prison. He’d lost his face inside all that fat, but he hadn’t lost his voice. He called out to Chris by name: “Christopher! Come in and see me!”
The first time, Chris pretended he hadn’t heard. But the next time, the voice came up the stairs after him and he turned around and went back down to stand in the doorway of the fat guy’s room. “You talking to me?”
“Your name’s Christopher, ain’t it?”
“How’d you know that?”
The guy was laughing and crying at the same time. “I know things. Please come in. I’m lonely.”
“I’m busy,” Chris started to say. “I gotta go look for work.”
“Nobody ever visits me. Nobody ever talks to me.”
“You’re lying.” Chris hated it when people made their problems worse than they were. “Somebody comes two or three times a day and brings you food.”
“That’s my mother. But she doesn’t visit me. She doesn’t talk to me.”
Chris stepped just inside the room. The guy was so huge he was pushed into every corner. It reeked in there. Food was smeared all over his face, if that was his face. His mouth was almost buried in the flesh, and Chris could see only one of his little eyes.
“Why do you let her shove all that crap into you all the time? Why do you let her keep you trapped in this room?”
Chris wasn’t any more surprised by the fat guy’s answer than by his own questions, and he knew they were both telling some version of the truth. “What I eat won’t come back to hurt me.”
“Sure it will,” Chris said, exasperated. “It’ll hurt you from inside.”
“What’s that?” The guy was suddenly eager, afraid. “What’s that in your hand? Did you bring me something? Something to eat?”
Chris opened his hand. His diamond was in it. He hadn’t realized he’d taken it out of his pocket. “That’s my diamond,” he said, reluctantly. “It used to be perfect, but now it’s ruined.”
“Let me have it.”
“Why?” Chris laughed. “You think you can fix it?”
Part of the enormous fleshy creature in the room with him simply swelled up around him and took the diamond away. Chris swore, thought to fight. But he watched the glittering gem disappear inside the wet mouth, heard gurgling noises, and then, horrified, saw and heard and smelled it being excreted at his feet.
“There you go,” the fat guy said with a flourish. He howled with laughter. He sobbed. “Good as new.”
But it wasn’t. When Christopher bent and picked his diamond out of the disgusting mess on the floor, it smelled of the fat guy’s insides, and the scratch was longer and dirtier than ever.
He backed out into the hall. The voice oozed out into the hall and up the stairs after him. “Come again, Christopher! Come visit me again!”
At the head of the stairs, where you couldn’t help looking right into it before you turned right to Christopher’s room or left to the bathroom, was a room full of furniture, neatly arranged and probably pretty expensive. The door was always open. He kept hearing a soft voice, just a little louder than a whisper, but for a long time he never saw who lived there.
The day he’d moved in he’d walked right into that room, not to steal anything (but that’s what they’d think if anybody saw him, and it made him shake, thinking about being locked up again), but just to see who lived there, to say hello. And somebody had been there because he’d talked to them, he’d had a long conversation with them about what they did all day (dreamed), what they ate (air and dust), what they looked like (whatever you like, just don’t hurt me). But he’d seen nobody, no matter how hard he’d looked. He just kept hearing this wonderful sweet voice, a young woman’s voice.
Maybe he could love somebody in his life besides Gina. Maybe he just hadn’t found the right woman who could make his diamond perfect again.
It wasn’t hard for Chris to find jobs, but it was hard for him to keep them. He got bored. He didn’t let people push him around. The morning he got fired from the dishwashing job, he came back to his hot yellow room, thinking he’d sleep for a while, watch some TV, maybe smoke a joint to relax. The door at the top of the stairs was wide open, as usual, but he didn’t hear the woman’s voice. Maybe it had left.
Christopher walked into the room of the voice and sat down in a rocking chair with a brocade seat. Everything in here was so ordinary, so perfect. As if the place had never been lived in.
“So,” he said, “how’s it going?”
No answer.
“Want some company?”
No answer. He was starting to think she’d tricked him. It wouldn’t be the first time.
He picked up a bowl with a pale blue Indian design and threw it down. On the thick rose-colored carpet it didn’t br
eak or even make much of a noise. “Talk to me,” he insisted, trying not to raise his voice very much. He knew she had invited him in here, but now she wouldn’t talk to him at all.
He stood up, walked across the room, kicked at the gleaming leg of a sofa. The sofa didn’t move. “Why don’t you talk to me, dammit! Nobody talks to me!”
Then—he couldn’t believe he was doing this—Christopher had squatted on the floor and was holding his diamond in both hands, holding it out as if offering it to the girl with the disembodied voice. “It used to be perfect,” he heard himself pleading. “You could make it perfect again.”
He talked and talked then, telling her his story of the perfect diamond and all the ways it had been scratched and marred and hurt over the years. He talked and talked, but the woman’s voice never came back.
After he’d been in her room a long time, talking about his diamond, Chris thought he understood. She’d been hurt a lot; she’d probably been invisible most of her life. Now she was afraid of him, afraid that he and his diamond would hurt her, so she’d deliberately lost her voice, too.
Retrieving the diamond from the pile of the rug where he’d laid it, he immediately felt the hole. The scratch had been turned into a gouge, that ate way into the stone.
Chris said he was sorry and walked out of the room, carrying his diamond in the cup of one palm and gently shutting the door behind him.
Then there was the guy who was all hair and a growl that seemed to start in the bottoms of his feet. And the girl who wore so much make-up all the time that Chris thought at first she was a painting hanging there on the wall. These two must have sat in the drab, dirty lobby all day and all night, because every time Chris passed through they were there. He never said anything to them and they never said anything to him.
One night, late, he came in a little drunk, a little stoned. He’d run into Bobby at the pancake house. Bobby was probably his best friend, outside of Gina—who, he reminded himself, wasn’t his friend anymore. He hadn’t seen Bobby the whole time he was in prison, had heard from him once and that was to borrow his tools that Gina still had; Chris had written back yes which was beside the point since Gina had probably already let Bobby take them; they always did have the hots for each other. All night at the pancake house and then at the bar and then at Bobby’s old lady’s place, neither one of them had mentioned the tools or Gina, and Chris drank and smoked more than he should have, more than he meant to, waiting for Bobby to say something. He had six days to get the crap out of his system before he saw his parole officer and took a UA.
So when Christopher staggered into the lobby of his apartment building that night and saw the hairy man and the made-up woman sitting there like always, he just went over to them without thinking about it and held out his diamond, noticing how badly his hand was shaking and supporting it with the other hand, and said, “Can you fix my diamond?”
Even to his own ears his words sounded so slurred that he wasn’t sure he’d said what he meant.
They didn’t even look. He couldn’t tell exactly where their eyes were, but he could tell that they didn’t look at his diamond, which appeared dull and worthless in his trembling hands because the hurt part was bigger than the good part by now.
The made-up woman shrieked with laughter that sounded angry and mournful. A growl passed from the soles of the hairy man’s feet up through his hairy body and out his mouth in a stream of rancid breath. “We all got diamonds, son, and one way or another they all get ruined.”
Christopher stayed up night after hot night, watching stupid horror movies where no matter what you did the monster didn’t stay dead. The people in the movies were always so dumb; they’d walk alone into the house where they’d heard the weird noise, or they’d try to pretend they hadn’t seen the ghost when they knew as well as he did that they had, or they’d decide they could beat the thing when nobody else in the entire two-hour movie had lasted five minutes against it. Chris wanted to yell—sometimes he did yell, since there wasn’t anybody around to object—”Don’t go in there! Turn around!” But the people in the movies didn’t listen any more than he would have if he’d been in their situation, and the monsters and ghosts and nameless creatures didn’t pay any attention to him either.
During the days he slept a lot, ate a lot. He didn’t look for work. He missed his appointment with his parole officer—at least, he thought he did; he had a vague sinking feeling and he thought that might be why, but he’d lost track of the days and nobody came after him so maybe not.
Sometime during one of those half-asleep days or half-awake nights, Christopher left his room and went up all the flights and half-flights of steps to the attic. In the part facing the alley a person lived. He’d seen them at the window, a gray oval or triangle or pyramid.
It wasn’t really a room. It was just a place under the eaves, cobwebby and riddled with mouse droppings, without any floor or ceiling or walls. Christopher stepped carefully.
It wasn’t really a person, either—or maybe it was some new kind of human being, a third sex, since it sure as hell wasn’t a man or a woman. It had no arms or legs and not much of a head. It was propped up in a rickety hard wooden chair. It looked young as a dead baby not even born yet, and at the same time so old Chris couldn’t imagine getting that old. It wore veils that could have been skin; Chris actually touched some of the soft fluttering lace.
“So what happened to you?” he asked, surprised by his own boldness. Somehow without planning it he’d sat down on the other uncomfortable wooden chair, crossed his arms and legs tight against his body and tucked in his chin. Somehow the diamond had tumbled onto the dusty floor between them. It looked bigger than it should be, and it glimmered. Christopher dared to hope that the terrible scratch had been smoothed away, but he couldn’t think how to find out.
He didn’t know which part of the body the voice came from, but it was as sharp and clear as any voice he’d ever heard. “I paid someone to cut everything off.”
It was a minute or two before Chris could bring himself to ask, “Why?”
“My mother and father would have done it anyway. I saw them with the knives. I heard them sharpening the knives. I heard them making plans for me. I was not going to let them hurt me anymore, so I beat them to it.”
“That’s crazy.”
The torso with the foreshortened head laughed. “You think so? Really? You think I am crazier than the rest of the people in this hotel? Crazier than you, say, obsessed with finding someone who can make your diamond perfect?” Chris knew it would have used its hands to wave in the air, to indicate him and the rest of the hotel, if it had had any hands.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Chris muttered. “You let them ruin your life.”
“Of course. Why not.”
“You didn’t have to let them turn you into a — a damned monster!”
Atop its lace-draped torso, the flat head shook fiercely from side to side, all grin and bony forehead. “No!” it screeched. “Do you not see? I turned myself into an angel! I am not of this world anymore!”
Chris had started to ask, “Can you fix my diamond?” when the torso stretched upward as far as it could, the lacy torn skin fluttered, and the creature rose through the roof of the building toward, he supposed, heaven.
“I hear you have a once-perfect diamond that has been spoiled.”
Christopher stirred in his bed. Hot yellow light bathed him. He was sweating, drowning.
“I can help you make it perfect again.”
Christopher opened his eyes. His head was pounding and his vision was blurred. Somebody was crouching too close beside him. He shouted, struck out with his fist, sat up, felt for the diamond under his pillow. It was still there. The scratch was so deep against his frantic fingertips that he was afraid the stone would split in two.
“Let me have it. I’ll show you how to make it more beautiful than ever.”
“No.” Christopher’s voice was hoarse and his throat hurt. He clear
ed his throat and said again, “No.”
“Okay, okay.” The guy backed off a little, sat down on the floor, and Chris saw that it was a woman, beautiful, sweet-smelling, taller than he was, stronger than he was for sure. “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll stay here. I’ll work on it in this room with you. I brought my tools. Let me have your diamond just for a little while, and we’ll fix it right here. You’ll see, we’ll make it more valuable and more perfect than it ever was before.”
Chris already knew he was going to give it to her. He roused himself enough to ask her, “Why would you do that? Why are you here?”
“Because I love you,” she said, and Chris was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.
He couldn’t take care of the diamond. It was too much for him. He wished he’d never had it in the first place. The woman would probably steal it. If she stole it, he’d die. That was okay with him. “Take it,” he said miserably, and she smiled and reached over with her long sweet mother’s fingers and took hold of his hands with the diamond cupped inside them.
She stayed there with him and worked on his diamond. She held and guided his hands as he did the work. Chris thought it took a long time, but it might not have. Her tools whined and whirred. She sang lullabies while they worked. Diamond dust got in his eyes and nose; he tasted diamond.
And it hurt. What they were doing to his diamond hurt him. Pain made him cry. His chest hurt. His heart hurt. He thought he was dying and to his surprise he didn’t want to die, but it was beyond him now, it was out of his control.
Finally, she came close to him again, lay down on the filthy mattress with him and took him in her arms. She pressed the throbbing diamond against his dry lips and called him by name. “Christopher. Look. Look at your diamond now.”
He didn’t want to look. He hid his face against her breast. “Did we take the scratches away? Did I make it perfect again?”
“It’s better than perfect. Look.” She eased his eyelids open with her fingertips, and he looked.
