by Alina Reyes
“Where’s the axe?”
“I lent it to Shirley Gordon,” Babe replied.
“I wonder if,” Elvis continued, his voice from beyond the grave chewing up the words into an overly slow, sickly sweet rap, “you’re lonesome tonight.”
“You need the axe?” asked Babe as she removed the defrosted pizza from the microwave.
“I’ve added some cheese and some oil,” she added, clearly pleased with the result.
And with her thick-padded oven glove she held aloft the Indefinable Golden Puffball, pumped up like a tire, dazzling as a flashgun, resplendent in its majestic and holy splendor.
“Hmmm!” said Bobby, licking his lips. “That looks pretty tasty … !”
“Don’t it just? I wonder what she wanted the axe for …”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, who knows with that one … Did you need it?”
“No. Who’d have thought you could get so much melted cheese on top of a pizza! I hope it doesn’t clog up our guts!”
“Oh, Bobby! That’s disgusting! Do you think I did wrong to lend her the axe?”
“No, why?”
“Dunno … You don’t think there’s a bit of a resemblance to Jack Nicholson?”
“Huh? The pizza?”
“Shirley Gordon.”
“Ah! Ooh! Yeah! Maybe … I don’t know, I’d need to take a closer look … Hmm, really fine …”
“Shirley Gordon?”
“The pizza.”
“What do you mean, you’d need to take a closer look? We’ve lived next door to her for ten years and you don’t know what she looks like?”
“Yeah, ’course I do … It’s just I’ve never noticed a resemblance to Marilyn Manson …”
“I didn’t say Marilyn Manson, I said Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson in The Shining.”
“Hey, now you mention it … Maybe you shouldn’t have lent her the axe, honey.”
“Excuse me, but I don’t find that funny. That woman is nuts—you know as well as I do. Please listen to me. What I’m trying to tell you is that it’ll end badly …”
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about? You ask me what I’m talking about? Take a look at the world around you …”
“You know, Marilyn Manson’s not bad either …”
“I’m sure she’s planning something nasty for us. She’s always spying on us …”
“Don’t get carried away. She’s just a poor girl who’s got nothing to do all day, that’s all.”
“‘Girl’? That big, flabby pudding? Oh, you make me sick.”
“Hey, it’s nothing to do with me.”
“OK, OK. You let her come on to you like she’s Miss Universe herself, but it’s nothing to do with you … Meanwhile, she’s always there. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you …”
“What’s with you this evening? Have you had a lousy day or something? Has Shirley upset you?”
“Will you please not call her Shirley!”
“What do you want me to call her? Jack Nicholson?”
“Shirley Gordon. Shirley Gordon is not our friend. I would like you to remember that.”
“I don’t give a damn about Shirley Gordon, OK?”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“It’s just a pity …”
“What?”
“We were doing fine, Carmen, you and me …”
“…”
“Babe?”
“Yes?”
“You asleep?”
“No.”
“Do we have to have Carmen lying between us?”
“Why?”
“I want you …”
“Take her, her …”
“Again?”
“She wants to.”
“What about you? Don’t you want to?”
“She’s insatiable.”
“A threesome, then …”
“No, her. I’ll guide you, I know what she wants.
“And me? Do you know what I want?”
“She knows. Come on, do what I tell you …”
φ
Sweet Jesus!” Babe gasped as she saw the patch of blood spreading over Jimmy’s white T-shirt. “Sweet Jesus, what happened to you?”
Before she had opened the door all she could see was his chubby, boyish face through the spyhole. He looked the same as usual. How could she have guessed the state he was in? And now he was just standing there on the doorstep, the axe in his hand, bleeding from his side, looking as if nothing were amiss.
“It’s nothing, ma’am,” he replied. “It’s the axe. It’s heavy … Mom asked me to bring your axe back and I fell …”
“You fell? What do you mean, you fell? Where did you fall?
“On the steps,” he said, turning around to point at the white wooden steps to the veranda, now stained with blood.
My God, thought Babe. I’ve got to take care of this boy.
They stood there in the doorway—Jimmy with his head lowered, his cheeks red, one arm dangling, the other stretched by the weight of the axe, the blade of which was grazing his ankle; Babe leaning slightly forward, her arms wide, as if she were about to take hold of a big baby that some teenage girl had abandoned on her porch—and like freshly caught fish they gasped for breath, their mouths wide-open.
Babe suddenly realized she had lost the cord of her plum-colored robe (still unwashed) and that it was flapping open over her naked body, revealing a rectangular gash of flesh from her neck to her fake blonde pubic hair.
The house was as silent as a bell jar, a giant napoleon; they had to pass through a vast mille-feuille of windows, Babe leading, Jimmy following, and their ears, their heads were filled with the sound of shattering glass as they walked through to the living room, a tinkling cacophony in the desert.
Carmen lay stretched out on her back on the couch. She was wearing the furry G-string from Pearl’s, with the matching bra and garter belt and sheer black stockings, which crinkled round her ankles.
The woman started speaking and the words flew out of her mouth like clouds of birds and skimmed over Jimmy’s body, pecking at it. He stood in front of Carmen, and when Mrs. Wesson came back from the bathroom with the jar of antiseptic, and when she stood right beside him and asked him to take off his T-shirt, he dropped the axe and reached out toward her. He could just touch her breast with the tips of his fingers. And they undressed in a sort of slow, disorderly way that at the same time was a mad rush, and there was nothing hard about Jimmy’s fat, white, warm, moist young body, nothing except his erect penis, and there was nothing hard in Babe’s gentle curves, nothing except her dark eyes, and there was nothing red in all this flesh, nothing except the blood that flowed from Jimmy’s wound and from Babe’s sex, which she displayed to Jimmy, legs apart, knees bent, opening it with both hands, just to show him what was what. And when they were completely naked, they pulled aside the living room table, laid Carmen on the floor, and Jimmy had to lie on top of her and do it, with the woman’s hand guiding him inside, That was my first woman, Jimmy will think later, and he will not be entirely sure whether it is Babe or Carmen he is thinking about, afterward there was blood on Carmen’s skin, they all had blood and sperm on their skin, Mrs. Wesson asked Jimmy to do a whole load of stuff, and Jimmy wanted to do everything she asked just so long as they touched his dick and pushed it into tight, warm, damp places, where he found paradise, from which he never wanted to be banished.
“Jiiimmy! Yoo-hoo, Jimmy! Answer me, dear, it’s your mom!”
Shirley’s mules clicked on the wooden steps, then she started rapping on the door with her fat little hand.
“Babe? Are you there? What’s my Jimmy up to? Jiiimmy! You’re not stuffing your face with cakes, are you? Come home, and stop annoying Mrs. Wesson! … Babe? You there, Babe? I sent Jimmy round with your axe, and …”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming!” Jimmy grunted, pushing away Babe, who was trying to help him get dressed.
“I’m here, Shirley! Jimmy and I were just having a little chat …”
Wrapped up in her stained robe, Babe appeared in the doorway, determined not to let anyone inside the house.
“Come on, Jimmy,” she called out, giving Shirley a firm stare that said “Keep your distance.” “Hurry up, your mom’s waiting for you!”
The boy’s chubby face appeared over her shoulder, and she stepped aside to let him pass. At the sight of her son’s bloody T-shirt, Shirley started screaming, the familiar piercing screams she used to express both horror and joy. (Consequently, the neighborhood found these grotesque manifestations of her existence completely unfathomable.)
Babe quickly shut the door. Then she went skipping and humming, like a child on her way home from school, to the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator door and knelt there in ecstasy before the light.
Her arms full of desserts, she came back to the living room and turned on the TV.
χ
The ground is covered with straw, some sort of hay, the enclosure surrounded by walls, not very high, to allow the natural light in, and it is quiet here, there is nothing else to do but to remain suspended in time like dust on the savannah, people can look in through the wide grille of the gate, the iron bars are thick, black and widely spaced, though not so wide that a child could squeeze through. In a corner at the back can be made out a sort of niche, a human-size niche. Babe is there somewhere, from time to time she may move a little, and from time to time she is spotted or even observed for a while, but she is not the most popular animal in the zoo, her enclosure is quite modest, one could walk by it without even noticing it, and it is tucked away in a quiet corner of the park, there are never many people in front of the bars, they glance in as they walk past and don’t see anything, but they aren’t too disappointed, because they weren’t expecting to see anything interesting, there was a time when they flocked in to see the human beings in the zoo, but now …
“I had a weird dream,” said Babe.
“Last night?” asked Bobby.
“No, no. Just now.”
“You dream while you’re awake?”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“The whisky, then …”
“Do you think so?”
“Dunno. It makes me think odd thoughts …”
“Really? Maybe we should drink more often.”
“Take it easy, baby. I don’t want to make love to a drunk.”
“Really?”
“If baby wants a feed, have some of this instead …”
They were sitting at the kitchen table.
“Do you know what I think?” Babe said. “Only the stars have the right to feed us. They never stop feeding us light, even during the day when we can’t see them, and afterward, we have nothing left …”
Bobby looked at the almost empty bottle.
“I’ll give you your goddamn light,” he muttered.
“It was the olives that gave me the idea. I looked in the refrigerator and I saw the olives. That made me think about whisky. So I said to myself, Hey, why don’t I have a little drink while I’m waiting for Bobby.”
“And what does my dick make you think about?”
“Carmen.”
“Oh, can’t you forget about her for a moment …”
“The poor thing, I left her on the floor in the living room …”
“Screw Carmen …”
“Oh, Bobby!”
“What? Huh? Aren’t we OK, just the two of us?”
“All I have to say is, if you carry on having hard-ons like that, I’ll cut it off!”
“Oh yeah? And how you going to have your fun when you’ve done that?”
“You think I need that to have fun? I DON’T NEED THAT!”
“I can see you don’t need it. You prefer women!”
“I DON’T PREFER WOMEN! I prefer Carmen, that’s all!”
“OK, I get it, loud and clear. So go and have a drink with her, instead of leaving her lying on the floor of the living room. Go on, go talk to her! She’s a great conversationalist!”
“Is that why you brought her into our house? Because of her conversation?”
“I got her because you didn’t want to fuck anymore.”
“Sure I wanted to fuck. Once a week. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“That’s enough for you, but not for me. A man has his needs …”
“I see … Men have ‘needs,’ like they need to go to the bathroom …”
“Yeah, right, and women, too. They do it like they’re constipated. With an effort, when they can’t avoid it anymore.”
“Is this about me?”
“No, it’s not about you.”
“Who then?”
“Nobody.”
“In any case, I don’t have a body anymore. You don’t have a body anymore. There aren’t any bodies, just the memory of bodies.”
“That’s enough …”
“We are slowly disappearing.”
“Babe, put the bottle down. Come here. Let’s just go to bed and sleep together.”
“It’s too late.”
“Come on, honey, I love you.”
“She’ll kill us, and we won’t even be able to rest in peace.”
“Come on, honey. Let’s go to bed. We don’t need to make love to prove we’re still lovers. Why are you crying?”
“For us … For Jimmy …”
“Jimmy? Shirley’s son?”
“Don’t call her Shirley!”
“Oh, give it a rest … ‘The neighbor,’ if you prefer.”
“‘Shirley Gordon.’”
“What about her, anyway? Has something happened to her son?”
“He’s lost his body.”
“What do you mean? Has he had an accident?”
“It was a sacrifice. Shirley Gordon sent her own son to be sacrificed. I’m scared, Bobby! We’re all destined! I know who Shirley Gordon is!”
“Of course you do …”
“She’s the one who sent Carmen to us.”
“No she isn’t …”
“She is God. Shirley Gordon is God incarnate. I’m scared …”
ψ
Night fell like a skyscraper, collapsing on top of the living with the inhuman force of the dark. Carmen lay on the floor in the lounge, her stomach stained with blood.
“We can’t keep her,” said Bobby.
“No,” said Babe.
Together they lifted her up and laid her on the ethnic throw on the couch. Babe freshened her up while Bobby went to find her some clothes in the bedroom. He chose the black outfit that Babe had bought for her parents’ funeral: they had died in a crash, far away from America, on their first-ever trip abroad.
In her mourning clothes, Carmen looked more alive than ever. Babe cried silently, her eyes hollowed out, her features drawn, her face aged by anguish, as she prepared her lover with tenderness and respect. Bobby sat in a chair, watching them with his strange, unseeing gaze, which for once seemed more frightened than unsettling.
Babe tried out several pairs of shoes on Carmen, then decided to leave her barefoot. She realized that this decision gave her a deep satisfaction and sense of consolation. As if, despite everything, she was preserving Carmen’s true nature: wild at heart.
When Babe had done Carmen’s hair and makeup (after a number of attempts, for her hands were trembling), they carried her down to the cellar. They had to stop several times on the stairs: her body felt like it was full of lead, and her dead weight pulled on their arms like cold molasses, opaque and dark like her staring eyes.
They installed her in the back of the Cadillac and fastened her in with loving care, as if the better to hide from her the fact that they had decided to dump her by the side of the road somewhere. Bobby sat in the driver’s seat with a sense of ceremony: it was a
car for special occasions. Babe sat next to him, yanked her robe down over her knees, fastened her seat belt and stared straight ahead with a dignified air.
The limousine glided majestically up the garage ramp, the headlights turned off so as not to attract attention from the neighbors, pale in the night like a gigantic pink dung beetle emerging from its hole at the hour when the ubiquitous, bright, shiny creatures of the daytime are going off to sleep.
At the end of the alley, on the other side of the crossroads, was parked a large 4×4. It began signaling with its dazzling lights. Bobby decided to switch on the lights of the Cadillac. As they turned left, they passed in front of the 4×4. Inside was Shirley Gordon. Her eyes shone like a cat’s; her fingers, with their painted nails, were wrapped round the steering wheel like a spider’s legs. She seemed to smile, raised her right hand and gave a little wave, wiggling her fingers as if they were attached to invisible strings, as if the dark in which the light patches of her face and hands floated was hiding an army of puppets whose dance she was controlling. Bobby put his foot down on the accelerator.
There was no one behind them except her. She had followed them across the housing project, followed them onto the highway, into the flux of fleeing headlights, and, when in a vain attempt to shake her off Bobby had turned into a side road, so quickly that his tires screeched around the hairpin, she had kept the same distance, as if she were happy to be dragged along by them, as if she had them in the stranglehold of her dark lasso in the dark night, and as if no swerve or kick or sudden change of course would cause her to loosen her grip.
And now Bobby was driving down this straight, deserted side road, bordered by a dark forest. Shirley Gordon, driving behind them, was blinding him with her headlights. Next to him, his wife Babe was asking him to go back. He could vaguely hear her saying that she didn’t really want to abandon Carmen, or else they could do it another time, it was better just to go quietly home now, he could feel the panic rising from their bodies and filling the enclosed space of the vehicle so palpably that it felt like concrete being poured round them and solidifying, preventing them from changing course or abandoning their goal, obliging them to drive ever onward.
