But now Cory had blundered into the hamster wheel of nonprofit, and Linda was here.
Linda was feeling the squirming beginnings of vomit when a mustached guy in a serape approached her, offering a long slender glass pipe. She took it from him and asked what it was. “Opium. You’ll like it,” he said.
She examined the slick brown lump in the bowl, lit it, and her lungs filled with a thick, dead-tasting greasiness, like boiling Vaseline. She took three more hits, letting the bitter smudge seethe from her teeth. “You said this is opium?”
Retrieving the pipe from Linda, the guy took a luxurious hit and said through a bush of smoke, “Actually it’s heroin. Actually it’s better than heroin. It’s death. But some people get all faggy when they hear the H-word. It’s all opiates.”
Her hands and cheeks warmed, matched by a queasy remorse that she was accustomed to pushing through. The thing she was indignant about was sapping her indignation. The pipe guy was still talking, one of those guys who became their drug preferences. Interrupting him, Linda rose like a fever up from the couch and headed outside to clear out her lungs with a cigarette.
When she couldn’t hear her own footsteps in the stairwell she realized how loud it had been inside; the sidewalk outside seemed muffled. She posted up by the stoop, near three girls with faces phosphoresced by their phones. Linda regretted breaking hers. Now she never knew the time.
She twisted the filter off an American Spirit, lit it, and crossed her eyes to stare at its gray-orange cherry. Cigarettes made ideal partners: they made you look good, let you be needy for five minutes before replacing them with another. Stimulation, orality, the breathplay of carbon monoxide. An unlit cigarette smelled like a raisin, a lit one like a cigarette, your fingers afterward like soy sauce. And yes, the romance of smoking was pure product placement, but it was still the sexiest way of hating yourself.
Her thing with Henrik had not been a cigarette but a campfire—blazing, oxygen-hungry. And she’d kicked dirt and pissed on him until he was out.
She went back in. Someone was switching the light off and on in time to the music. While she splashed gin into a cup, she noticed a guy slouching in a corner as if being punished for his lanky height. When they met eyes, he approached, and she began to plan his evisceration, until he passed under a black light and Linda registered something familiar in his shrewish face: dishonor, trouble, evil—
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Since she’d left him, Baptist had grown his hair to squire length, though still with those side-flopping bangs. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and a full auburn beard that was mangy over the cheeks, a brown leather jacket distressed like a golem. She might not have left him as quickly if he’d looked like this, able to make good on his testosterone.
Backing away, Linda cut the bathroom line and slipped in just as someone else left, locking the door. As she searched the tremendous bathroom for a window to dive through, Baptist entered through a second door from the master bedroom, and locked it as well. He clutched Linda’s arm, another appetizing show of dominance Linda had assumed he wasn’t capable of. They ignored the guy passed out in the bathtub. Baptist’s pubescent voice echoed off the shiny black tile. “I just want to talk.”
Linda threw off Baptist’s grasp. “Nice glasses, fuckface. You look like a professor of douche studies.”
“I’ve been trying to contact you. You’re living with Eve and Jared now.”
“The fuck you know Eve?”
“I know Jared. Eve works with my girlfriend. Everyone knows everyone.”
“Does your girlfriend know you’re stalking me?”
Even in the bathroom, the music was loud enough that Baptist had to lean in close to Linda. “I was tripping last fall, but I’m over it. My mom set me up in this apartment and helped me pay down my bills. I’m sober and I met a girl who loves me. I’m not stalking you, but I’ve been kind of obsessed with figuring out what happened with us. If you let me say something I promise I’ll leave you alone forever.”
Someone battered the bathroom door. Linda leaned against the sink. “Fine.”
Baptist pushed his bangs back and they swayed forward again. He stuck out a counting pinkie. “First, you’re insecure, like everyone. You’re conflicted because you want to be liked, but want even more to be resented—to be stared at, to make people ashamed of their inferior wit and taste. The sincerest form of flattery. Feels good, right? You wouldn’t even be letting me take you down like this if it weren’t proof in itself that you got under my skin.”
She reached over and curled Baptist’s pinkie back into his fist. “Anxiously awaiting substance.”
“You make yourself unapproachable. So you provoke, because if you’re awful and people still put up with it, then you must be special, and you justify being shitty by pretending you’re being even harder on yourself. Also, for someone who complains about ‘fashions’ and ‘topicality’ in books, can I point out that your hobbies, clothes, even the way you talk couldn’t be more contemporary?”
Linda half smiled and belched, as if intentionally. She was hearing about 60 percent of what he was saying. More slapping at the door. “Cool. How much do I owe for the session?”
“Okay, last few things. I’m sure you know that all your posturing just covers up your thin résumé. Which makes you loathe yourself, even more so because you know the only people you’re impressing are those whose admiration you despise, like me. You hate anyone who’s not as smart as you aspire to be. Because you can manipulate them, or because they don’t try hard enough to see through you. Even worse is that you both resent men and live for their attention, and your attention-getting makes other girls either despise or lose respect for you. Basically, you’re lonely, and exploit desperate guys for validation, being sure to make them suffer so that you’re not technically serving them. But ironically that makes you, like, metaneedy—you need their need. And finally you inflate this loneliness to existential proportions, convince yourself it’s more than just self-manufactured twenty-something drama. But that’s all it is: drama. Sorry I’m rushing this; I had more to say.”
“Well, friendo,” Linda said, hair-flipping over each shoulder, “I mean, thanks for the tête-à-twat. I wish I had half as much to say about you, but you’re just another dipshit techie man-child who thinks women are Rubik’s Cubes, and just realized that having money doesn’t make him interesting or any less of a cunt.”
“Thanks for proving my point. Whenever anyone gets real with you, you shrink them and squish them. You’re good at it, because you can do donuts around most people intellectually. But then you’re invincible and alone. Stuck thinking, ‘Why isn’t my life as great as me?’ That, I do not envy.”
Linda was struck by the cunning of Baptist’s accidental checkmate: that she was wrong for being right, and her reflexive comeback—that she’d already heard everything he was telling her—forced her to admit he was right. “Sure, man,” she said, pushing in her cuticles until she located the rhetorical fire exit. “So, what, like, I’m supposed to feel contrite and start crying? That’s what you want? Fuck you.”
Baptist shrugged and extended a hand that Linda left unspliced. “We’re good. I’ll mail your stuff to Eve. And chew some gum, you’re stank as hell.”
He exited into the bedroom, while Linda, not to be seen leaving with him, left through the hallway, shoulder-checking past a gauntlet of hisses and snack-missiles from the long bathroom line. People were dancing in the living room, and every horizontal surface was covered in drinks. Linda picked up the nearest cup and drank from it, stopping when she saw a long red hair plastered to its inside, half-immersed. How shitty of Baptist to ambush her while she was fucked up. And how shitty of San Francisco for being too small to churn away consequence. There was no getting lost.
Hearing laughter, Linda turned to make sure it wasn’t at her. Three guys sat around a glass coffee table, which held something that looked like a nude baby and, on second glance, was a nude baby. One of the
guys was pouring vodka into its mouth. Linda dropped her drink and pushed bodies out of the way—What the fuck!—but on third glance the baby was a doll, the kind that wet itself. They were doing baby shots. She was going to murder them if they laughed, but they offered her the doll instead, and to save face she grabbed its floppy legs and drank down six ounces of rubber-smelling vodka. She dropped the doll and walked away, wondering if anything smart could ever be said about this.
As she dreamily removed her jacket and laid her head against the armrest of the couch that she was apparently sitting on, exhaustion snuggled up like an enormous grub in her head. Her consciousness bobbed between this room and its shadowy double in Hell. She closed her eyes, and an unwanted insight lit up before her: PARTIES AREN’T FUN. That you could have fun at a party only confused matters. Alcohol, drugs. Bad dancing to bad music with the wrong number of people. Crowded hallways. Photos. Groping on a bed of coats. Something spills or breaks, someone pukes. A fight. You might meet someone new and interesting, but broadly speaking people were less new and interesting every day.
Eve and Jared were at her side, wearing their coats, along with a pudgy bald stranger in a polo shirt. “Linda, we found a ride. Let’s dip.”
Linda stood and leaned on a wall, or a door, or a floor. “What for? You hired a sitter.”
“The scene is sketch as fuck.”
“This shit’s not good for my recovery,” Jared added.
“Aw, booboo doesn’t drink! What the fuck did you expect at a party?”
“Well, we got up at seven, so we gotta go now or we’ll be wiped in the morning.”
“Oh, we’ll be, be’ll we? Fuck your conjugal we. And who’s this shithead?” Linda ran up on the bald guy.
“He’s driving us home. Don’t get outta line.”
“Ew, those shitty piercings. You’re that guy who can’t think up a good tattoo and just goes for maximum holes.”
The bald guy turned to Eve. “She’s coming with us?”
“No way I’m going with this fuggin . . . bald-ass Drakkar Noir fuggin faggot.”
“Linda, this shit is not cute.”
Linda slapped the guy’s jaw, gave him a sturdy headbutt, then went grabbing at his ears. He pushed her off and sank into the dancing crowd. Eve rested her fingertips against her temples, and Jared called after the bald guy.
“Whatever. Go watch your movie. Boring cunts.”
“Jared, let’s go. Bitch, you’re out of our apartment. Handle your shit.”
Eve left, and Linda touched away a warm spot on her brow that, no matter how much she looked at it, was blood. Blood was so sincere. Must be why people made promises with it. Maybe it was sincerity itself—she should write that down. Where was her purse? Forget the pen, she’d write in blood. Write her epitaph. Epigraph. Prologue. Foreword. Backward. The sleeve of her leather jacket hailed from behind a couch cushion, and she yanked it out and put it on. She needed a ride but she was too faded to find an exploitable guy. The inside of her dress smelled like not quite yogurt. She wouldn’t even make good prey.
Someone was yelling at her, pushing her forward. On her way to the door she seized the edge of a table and overturned it, sending plastic cups and beer cans spinning to the floor in pinwheels of foam. This was becoming her personal cliché: exile from a strange home, a hasty scramble down dark stairs, unnecessary things left behind. That was the last thing she would recall, later.
?. ????????
It was later. A thin white horizon grew, uncurtained from above, and was nothing but a ceiling. She couldn’t move; with great effort she observed herself. Limbs muffed in gauze dangled from slings and cables in stiff angles of salute. When she tried to move her leg, the bone snarled in pain, feeling nailed to a plank of wood, and her vision wobbled with tears. Then she was all nose, and the tubes that ran up it gouged and gagged her. Her lungs slurped whenever she inhaled.
This was Linda drained of Lindahood, less a person than a sentient body, no realer than words on a document, struck from subject into object—that is, things that felt terrible felt like her. Possibly this new pain would be her great achievement, possessing all the qualities she’d wanted for her writing: a pioneering agony that both straddled genres (thriller, mystery, horror) and defied them, baroque and maximalist, enveloping her with its belabored detail and longeurs, high modernist in its stern insistence on a total universe, its difficulty.
As soon as she could speak she screamed. First that she’d been blinded, though it was just that her contact lens was knocked out. She punched the nurse call button for attacks of gas, dementing face itches, and her sordid bedpan concerns. She requested wet towels and pled for cigarettes until her nurse brought in the resident doctor, muttering about Linda’s “acute supratentorial issues” as if she couldn’t guess what that meant. The doctor read the damage, a list that would be difficult to memorize if not for the rote tutorials of pain: three cracked ribs, broken right wrist, clavicle, right fibula. Palms, feet, and knees icy with abrasions. “Also,” he added, “you’ve got really high cholesterol.”
He added that, considering her injuries, she really ought to be dead. He was right. She was tragically prehumous; since she was a reader, most people she cared about were dead or fictional. In Valéry, Phaedrus complained that he couldn’t hear or see in the underworld, and Socrates replied, Perhaps you are not sufficiently dead. Always it was the freckle of vulgar life, bringing pain, seeming to persist no matter what, that denied her the immortality of death.
In her first conscious hours she enacted every convalescent cliché. Will I be all right? (“Everything’s going to be fine.”) Be honest, is it bad? (“It’s not good. We’ll have to insert a metal rod in your arm.”) She even begged for a mirror. Both her top front teeth were punched out, a bottom incisor snapped down to an angled shard. Her tongue was speed-lined with road rash, and a trail of black stitches ran along it from tip to center. Her upper lip split at one peak. Touching her teeth together completed a vile circuit that sent currents of frost and flame through her skull. She stared at the holes. Only money would fill them. How much sex work would it take to pay it down—how many shudders, what pledge of remaining innocence? No, nobody would pay for that now. She’d need a job that didn’t require a face. Office manager, paralegal. And she would have to keep her mouth shut.
An SFPD pig came visiting in his black serge and flat cap to collect a statement for the incident report, assuring her that she wasn’t in any trouble, and she thought that was funny. What do you remember, he asked. Nothing. Nothing at all? I remember . . .
II. A Vehicle
The rain outside Baptist’s apartment made the asphalt sear with vertical files of reflected neon. The night was curved like a lens. The street gave her two directions to home. She lunged into the slut-shaming chill of night, posture muscles limp but thighs steady under their swaying elastic freight. Near the corner she slipped on a shred of someone’s discarded wig and went stumbling into a wall. Cars sped by, sucked up the ramp of asphalt, hissing black rainslick under their tires. Then the street sped by, and Linda bent at the knees to fix her purchase on the ground. She reached the corner but she couldn’t read the signs. Now there were twice as many ways. She hitched one arm around a lamppost and dropped an orange scarf of vomit.
From here it was trick-camera and split-screen. Memory to be constructed into something less obviously stupid and trivial than it obviously was, filtered through consciousness, refined into language, rolled and toasted into literature. Someone had to choose the words. Every account was a frame around chaos, excluding this and highlighting that, thus fiction by omission, no matter how factual. No accident that modernism and cars arrived at the same time; inevitable that they should collide.
The only witness surges downhill on Dolores at two A.M., acceleration putting a tickle of freefall into his stomach and making worms of rain sprint across his windshield. Fleshy blur where his face should be. He pokes at the Seek button, blows cigarette smoke out the window, free
ing it invisibly into the wind.
Theirs is a meeting of misdemeanors, jaywalker and speeder, two trajectories in the vastness of spacetime converging in a bursting asterisk. Deus ex machina—here was a last-minute metaphor all right, a narrative vehicle stinking of ye olde emergency conceit, the overpowering heaviness and all-transformingness out of nowhere and zoom, it’s off with the plot. The way that all failed metaphors smashed together the irreconcilable; how they rammed aside the real to advance someone’s cheap tidy idea of the world.
She who lives by the metaphor, etc.
At this speed Linda is no more than a startled flash, a single spooked frame registering nothing but its own displacement as her body takes over the car’s hard motion. How far she flew, struck through. Going up. Turning over. She hits the curb with her chest and rolls to a stop between a mailbox and a trash can.
The record contains only loose sense-data for this interval of ink and void: the smell of close wet concrete, a trembling bubble of shame expanding from her mouth, hazy glowing edges where the rainbow of consciousness bands off into ultraviolet. Every blink reshakes the kaleidoscope. The sound of a city night returns, distant acouasms of traffic, and seeing the lee shore of waking she understands she’s dying. No more shame. Her torn dress and jacket, the night, and the forked lightning strike of her blood across the sidewalk are fragments of the same blackness. A rotating fire draws close, licking, licking across the building fronts. Something lifts her up and back down, uncoiling things and tying them to her arm. She lightens and unexists. A weighty phantom on top of Linda tries to shout with her voice, but her mouth is full of her tongue.
Private Citizens: A Novel Page 19
