Wide Eyed

by Trinie Dalton

  “Yeah, yeah. But at Disneyland yesterday, I thought you were trying to kill me,” I tell her. “Now I know you’re innocent.”

  “Good,” Laura says. “What, are you like taking steroids or something? You’re sweating like a horse.”

  “Fuck it,” I tell her. “That’s not the point. I realized something. I realized that you may be tweaked, but you’re no psychic vampire. I thought about dad. I thought about how your mom kept it secret. It was like she was in the glass elevator. She could see everything going on, she was taking it through the roof, and we just twirled around, like cows in a tornado. Well, that’s over. I’m in my own elevator now, and you can’t push me out of it!”

  “Okay,” she says, rubbing her head like she has a headache. She asks, “Were you up all night?”

  “No, man, I was dreaming about hippos and glass teeth.”

  As I hear myself say that, I wonder if I am finally dead, and if these conversations are the kind dead people have in their dreams. Assuming the dead dream.

  A UNICORN-LOVER’S ROAD TRIP

  I. Souvenirs

  Texas is shaped like a cross. Love’s gift shops were crosses too, with long, gridlike aisles. Each shop was stationed at a truck stop and had a disco-era, red heart logo. I got lost in Love’s rows of junk. They were stocked with Lone Star State souvenirs: baseball caps embroidered with farting bulls, leather Texas-shaped key chains, and miniature die-cast metal oil-drilling machinery.

  Love’s also sold unicorns. They had nonfunctional 3-D sculpted unicorn plates, glass unicorns with gold hooves and horns, and fake jade unicorn carvings imported from China. I guess Love’s carried these overpriced animals to provide homebound truckers with whimsical trinkets for their wives, girlfriends, and daughters. Their ladies thank, hug, and kiss them, adding the unicorns to their curio shelves. All over Texas, females gaze sentimentally into glass cases crammed with unicorns, reminiscing about the time Dad came home.

  Unicorn souvenirs symbolize a man’s distance from the women who love him. A unicorn’s essential magic is diminished in tacky gift exchanges. My boyfriend Matt gives me unicorns sometimes, but only really nice ones. I can’t justify buying pricey souvenirs for myself. Therefore, I only bought unicorn greeting cards. I don’t want to become a woman whose house is full of cheap sculpture.

  II. Lodging

  Matt and I pulled off at a dilapidated roadside motel. Some windows were boarded up, and the walls were stacks of half-painted cinderblocks. But there wasn’t another motel for miles. The manager’s front porch was a single gas pump. He lived in a gas station. I couldn’t imagine his life of constant pumping, dreams and sex interrupted by ringing bells when customers pulled up.

  Our room smelled like shit. Old dishtowels were stapled over the windows. A stained mattress hid a powdery pile of cement where construction had halted. A lamp with an insect-hating bulb cast a druggy yellow glow. Porn was the only thing on TV. Our bed was lopsided thanks to squeaky, broken springs.

  Lying there, we wondered if our lives were in danger. In the car I’d been horny and now I wasn’t. We got dressed, returned the key, and continued driving ganked up on sugary orange-slice candies.

  Sixty miles later, we reached a town with a string of motels, and chose one that looked more promising. A patchouli-scented Indian man escorted us to Room 8. Hanging above the bed was a picture of a unicorn and her colt enjoying waterfalls and mistmade rainbows. They stood on an island surrounded by streams and wild ginger plants.

  We set down our luggage. My faith in unicorns was renewed. We’d stumbled out of Texas and into paradise. I got horny again thinking of magic horses.

  III. The Obsession

  I’ve dreamt of unicorns my whole life. I want one for a pet. Unicorns are real. I see them peering out from behind boulders in the woods. Unicorn-pegasuses fly across full-moonscapes when I stargaze. I count on unicorns appearing when everything goes well. They represent safety and hope.

  But I also love raunchy white-trash unicorns. There are lots of them in Texas, mixed among the classic ones. Unicorns reflect the thoughts of people who appreciate them. Fantasy animals manifest human desires.

  IV. Gasoline

  My main goal on road trips is to avoid running out of gas, so gasoline is always an issue.

  When I turned sixteen, I took my first solo road trip to Las Vegas. I ran out of gas and pulled off the highway. A kind man stopped and emptied his red canister into my tank. Another time, I had to drive fifty miles on fumes.

  One day in Texas, Matt and I barely made it. We were so relieved to see the giant red heart. When we drove into Love’s, Matt filled the gas tank and I went inside to pee.

  A haggard man eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos leaned against the hot dog display. I remembered a bouffant-sporting poodle lady driving a pink Mary Kay Cadillac back in Dallas. She was eating Cheetos too. Texas seemed junky.

  Then a glint of refracted florescent light caught my peripheral vision. A table of tiny crystal unicorns shined and sparkled. They were half-priced from having chipped tails, scratched-up manes, and missing horns.

  “You like them unicorns?” the sales lady asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can I have one for free?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  I wasn’t going to pay $6 for a broken unicorn. I went out to the car, got the camera, came back in, and shot some pictures of the unicorn spread. The figurines gave me a reason to be in Texas. Suddenly, I was a unicorn photographer. My truck stop spread could be in a fashion magazine. Unicorns never go out of style. I’ve got folders full of magazine unicorns. Cameras often capture the magic of mythical creatures. I wanted to document the delicate, rejected horses and give their lives in Texas meaning.

  V. Geography

  Natural Bridge Caverns’ mascot was a slick orange brontosaurus. I expected to see a dinosaur caged in an ornately carved stone pen. Matt and I skipped the Alamo so we could go underground.

  Driving to the caves took us through Austrian-style villages landscaped with tulips, windsocks blowing from porches, and cobblestone driveways. Billboards advertised frothy steins of lager. It was a challenge not to pull off the road and get wasted.

  At Natural Bridge, opalescent white limestone walls were frosted with thin layers of warm, sulfuric water. Steep, curvy paths lined with colored spotlights gave the caves a kitschy, interplanetary feeling. A “fried egg” stalagmite glowed from red to green when Matt’s camera flashed on it. A glossy black heap of bat guano had a brontosaurus shape like one had suffocated underneath it. Silt in the creek beds looked like finely ground white pepper. Blind cave-dwelling shrimp may have been hiding in wet crevices.

  As our tour group wound through prehistoric spires and mounds, I noted the majestic names of the formations: Sherwood Forest, Castle of the White Giants, King’s Throne. Castle of the White Giants? It was a gigantic room, baroquely decorated with chandeliers, cave bacon, drapery, and other aptly named rocks and mineral deposits. A hump shaped like a harpsichord caught my eye. The 100-foot-high ceiling dwarfed 50-foot stalactites hanging over us. The socalled “white giants” reminded me of unicorn horns. How many blind shrimp were skewered as those horns emerged during some ancient earthquake?

  The ruinous “castle” was a fractured royal home built atop a network of unicorn horns. Tangled, they made a thorny crown on which the palace was balanced. I felt dwarfed imagining skyscraper-sized unicorns living in Earth’s mantle. They drilled up to the surface slaying any beast that got in their way. I was scared of unicorns when I had this vertiginous realization of our planet’s depths.

  VI. Food

  Love’s sandwiches were disgusting. The turkey was dry and the lettuce was limp. People lined up for food like pigs along a trough.

  Fast-food joints lined the highway. Every car was packed with obese people flaunting cigarettes, burgers, and sodas. Dairy Queens in Texas had burgers called “Belt Busters.”

  Eventually we found a family-owned sandwich shop. The deli workers loo
ked like Def Leppard. It took about twenty minutes to get our lunch, so Matt and I looked at this display case stuffed with hunting knives, switchblades, and handcuffs.

  Where there are heavy-metal weapons, there are unicorns. It’s a barbarian thing. One dagger had a unicorn head tooled onto its black leather handgrip. The horse looked up at the blade with dedication and reverence. Unicorns elucidate the emotions of weaponry enthusiasts. They can convey macho illusions of grandeur with violent historical periods. The horn takes on phallic significance. No matter where I am, unicorns clarify the environment. I judge people depending on what kinds of unicorns they have. It might be unfair to remember Texas only by its unicorns, but there were so many—that counts for something.

  OCEANIC

  At night, paradise is a wilderness. I’m in Maui for a friend’s wedding, staying in animal heaven—a hotel where birds, fish, mongoose, snakes, butterflies, lizards, and housecats converge. During the daytime it’s sort of like Edward Hicks’s friendly painting Peaceable Kingdom. At night, turtles skim the sandy ocean bottom for algae and sharks lunge from the water to catch flying fish. I’m lying awake between crisp sheets, paralyzed by underwater fantasies.

  All my friends are out skinny-dipping in the surf. I’m starring in The Shining. I’m Shelley Duvall, running down the halls trying to escape my psychotic husband. Bloody flash floods and door-choppings are my future.

  When I stay in nice hotels—not the roadside kind— I get terrified of walking the dark halls alone. Too many living beings have inhabited them, or have died in the rooms. For this reason, I have a tendency to drink too much once I’ve checked in.

  Everyone returns from the starlit swim.

  “You should’ve come,” Heidi says. “It was awesome.” Of course it was awesome. Everything’s awesome because she’s about to get married. I sip my rum and coke.

  “I’m not getting in that water at night.” I remind her about the clownfish, puffer fish, brain coral, sea bass, and purple-spiked sea anemones we saw while snorkeling yesterday.

  “It’s the same fish whether you can see them or not,” she says.

  Do you ever dream while you’re awake? I couldn’t sleep on the red-eye out here, nor last night after six piña coladas on the beach, following hours of floating through the reef.

  The dream: I swim out to meet Heidi, who’s treading water under a rocky arch that protrudes from a deep forest of coral. Crystalline turquoise water carries honeycomb-shaped rods of sunlight hundreds of feet down. I have my snorkel and mask around my neck, but I don’t want to put them on to see how far we are from the bottom. It’s deep enough for whales to pass beneath us.

  “I’m tired,” she says. “I’m swimming back.”

  As soon as she turns into a speck on the blue horizon, creatures congregate below.

  First, the monk seal, whose whiskers tickle my toes as he decides whether I’m something to eat or hump. While he sniffs me, I wonder would it be more foodlike to paddle my legs in a scissoring motion, or coast with no movement as if I were already dead? Next, a school of barracudas arrive to circle under him, their teeth ready to use on his brown leathery flesh. Down below the barracudas appear a pod of gray, rubbery things. And hovering below them, a massive white shadow. There’s no way I’ll put on my mask. I want to know, but I don’t.

  The next morning, I put on a sundress and flip-flops, then stop at the café for a muffin and a glass of guava juice—No rum today, I think. Must sleep. In the chaise lounge area I ask the man sitting next to me what seals eat, and he tells me they eat lots of things.

  “They wouldn’t eat you, though, unless you were attacking their babies,” he says, rubbing coconut oil onto himself.

  The bride to be, my best friend, takes the chaise lounge next to mine—I reserved it with my muffin wrapper and sandals—and tells me my feet were twitching while I dozed on the sofa last night.

  “A monk seal was about to attack me,” I say.

  “They don’t eat humans,” she says, not moving her head from sunbathing position. So the man was right. Heidi knows it all now that she lives on Maui.

  “The only predators out there are jellyfish,” she says, “and they’re clear, so there’s nothing you can do.”

  I hadn’t thought of jellyfish.

  “I can’t sleep,” I say. “I keep thinking of that part in The Shining where she opens the bathroom window to escape and the snow’s blocked her in.”

  “You’re in Hawaii,” she says.

  When I’m home on the mainland, I go out to the desert sometimes and rent a room by myself. One time I was sitting naked on the bed watching Three’s Company. It was hardly visible due to bad reception. Green and red lines streaked across Jack and Chrissie’s faces. I snacked on some saltines then opened the dresser drawer to check for a Gideon Bible. I read the instruction card for making outside calls, just in case. The air-conditioning froze my stomach when I stood in front of the unit.

  I put on my bra, panties, and stockings, to increase my vulnerability. If a pervert were spying on me through my curtains, he would be more likely to strike if he saw me in lacy undergarments, or so movies would have you believe. Naked, I’m pale and blubbery.

  When I was in elementary school and first learned about the realities of rape, I remember riding home on the bus from a field trip to Disneyland and wishing I had been dragged into Adventureland, then raped behind Thunder Mountain. Gazing out the window of that reeking, nasty bus, I felt rejected by the imaginary rapist. I wasn’t cute or slutty enough. Being slutty was what I aspired to. Bouncing up and down on the black seat helped me imagine being forcibly fornicated by some hairy-chested man. The girl sharing my seat didn’t think the rape idea was as sweet as I did; she told me no one ever wants to get raped. I felt stupid for not knowing that. I’d thought it could be fun.

  Maybe the monk seal had raped me. He’d sucked on my toes as if they were calamari.

  Late in the afternoon, I still haven’t fallen asleep. I call my boyfriend back home in California. “Do you ever feel like killing someone?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” he says. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m so tired I feel like a shark, if that makes any sense. I look around at all these women wearing diamond rings and Gucci sunglasses, and I think they need a little poke. Sharks poke things, right?”

  “I guess,” he says. “You mean you want to attack them?”

  “Yeah, I wish I could shred some people up. But isn’t it weird to be scared of attackers when you want to attack?”

  “Every man for himself,” he says.

  I’m assigned bartender duty because at dinner I announced I wasn’t going to drink. Why they need a sober drink-mixer is beyond me. I make strawberry daiquiris, papaya margaritas, and mai tais. Another girl pushes maraschino cherries and triangular pineapple slices onto toothpicks. We’re in the honeymoon suite, which has a bar built into the mirrored wall. Every time I make a new blender full of fruity stuff, I test it and add more rum. After a while, I have three drinks going on the side at once. I check out my tan in the mirror, thinking, I like being tan.

  The groom’s best man gets out three huge joints. We pretend they’re champagne or something and make a toast. The ceremony is tomorrow. To your life on the island, we say. To your life with the monk seal, I say to myself. There’s so much I could learn: is a seal’s penis barbed?

  I excuse myself and head down to the ocean. I step onto to sand and kick my sandals off into the bushes. The supply rental booth’s windows are boarded up but the door is unlocked. I go inside and steal myself a pair of flippers. Flippers will make me more attractive. Maybe seals turn one another on by slapping each other on the ass. Maybe getting slapped feels like a massage. I turn my feet out to the sides to move across the sand without tripping. It’s time to swim to my husband.

  LOU IN THE MOONLIGHT

  I have pleasant dreams in my moon garden. Serenity is key. When I’m sitting on that stone bench beneath the morning glorie
s, nothing stresses me out. My dog’s red fur glows like heated copper in the moonlight. He’s a buff metalsmith protecting me from worldly harm. He wears a shredded shirt, and beads of sweat dangle off the tips of his red-orange beard as he pounds on his anvil. He has a sword tattooed on his upper arm. He’s the perfect bodyguard, the kind of man who will linger in the background and jump out with a machete if anything sketchy happens to me. My dog is the best.

  Planting a moon garden isn’t difficult. I started when my dog was a puppy and kept me up all night. I needed to occupy myself during the wee hours. Before I got my dog, I didn’t sleep well either because in silence my mind takes over. I think too much. Planting datura and nicotiana seemed like the answer. Thus, I dig and weed in my pajamas. When I’m exhausted and dirty from gardening, I can get some rest. Commitment to the plants is the closest I’ve come to putting down roots. It’s like we’re married because they depend on me.

  “Your garden looks good,” my neighbor calls over the fence. I’m gardening and the moon’s coming up. Not just good, lady, magical, I think. That neighbor bugs me. She’s a squat, pudgy troll. She thinks something’s wrong because I spend so much time outside at night. My house is tiny. I use the yard as another room. I wear my pajamas because they’re comfortable. There’s nothing weird about that. I’m nocturnal. This woman looks like an ex-boyfriend I broke up with because he reminded me of Grumpy.

  I lie on the stone bench beside my garden like I’m Snow White in a glass coffin. I pretend that dwarves stand around tossing roses at me in mourning. Envisioning myself as Snow White makes me super horny, and lying in my imaginary coffin out in the moon garden is as good or better than having sex. To be quite frank, my moon garden is the horniest place on Earth. I love going there, and so does my dog. If only I had a Prince Charming.

  My mom came over for lunch a few weekends ago. She’s clueless. She doesn’t understand why I like to work at night.