Blood. Spyder’s blood.
Niki grabbed for the handkerchief, soppy cold, and scrubbed at the stain, and then shame at her horror, that there might be something in Spyder’s blood more dangerous than her own. She dropped the white cloth, plop, back into the rust-stained sink.
The water isn’t ever going to get warm, Niki, not tonight, her pecan-shell eyes said from the broken looking glass, eyes that looked suddenly older than the smooth face they were plugged into, the eyes of someone who ought to know better than to have ever wondered if the water was going to get warm.
What happened back there, Niki?, remembering that moment in the parking lot at Dr. Jekyll’s, something there and then gone again, but something left behind, too. And suddenly the cold in the little restroom seemed to press at her, deep-sea pressure, liquid cold, and she gasped.
A whisper somewhere behind her, from the stalls or the hall outside or right into her ear, something dreamed, maybe, and forgotten on purpose. It isn’t hard to drown, not if that’s what you’re after….
Niki turned off the faucet, quick twist and the water stopped flowing, squeezed out the handkerchief; she left the light in the restroom burning and hurried back to Keith’s apartment.
Spyder didn’t flinch when Niki touched the wet handkerchief to the cut on her forehead. It was deep enough to need stitches; Niki was afraid that if she rubbed too hard at the dried blood, she’d see bone underneath. She dabbed, gentle as she could, and fresh blood welled up along the half-moon slash, ugly loose flap of meat as wide as her thumb.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s gotta hurt.”
“Yeah,” Spyder said, soft chuckle, “Like a motherfucker.”
Now Keith and Daria were together on the mattress, Mort on the floor next to them, the Thunderbird just about gone. Theo had picked through the boxes of clothing, had come up with a couple of raggedy flannel shirts and a ridiculous-looking toboggan cap, Play-Doh blue with a huge lavender pom-pom sewn on top. She’d jammed the cap on over her fallen pompadour, wrapped the shirts around her double-breasted polyester jacket and sat back down under the Nirvana poster.
“You’d be a lot warmer over here,” Mort had said, had patted the floor beside him, and she’d told him to go fuck himself, that she’d have been warmer in her own goddamn apartment.
Niki had barely begun, and already the handkerchief was filthy crimson and she was just smearing the same blood and grime around and around. She considered going back to the restroom, rinsing it out and starting over again, but the thought of another stroll down that hallway made her shiver, the thought of her reflection in that fractured mirror. Instead, she tried wiping it clean on the carpet, silently dared Keith to object; he didn’t, of course.
“You don’t have to do this,” Spyder said quietly.
“I just wish you’d let us take you to a doctor.”
Now there was a bloody splotch on the carpet, and the handkerchief was still a useless mess. Niki looked around the room, spotted a crumpled Taco Bell bag nearby.
“Just a second,” she said, and yes, there were paper napkins inside, only one grease-stained from the half-eaten and mummified burrito hidden at the bottom. And there were at least a dozen other fast food bags scattered around the room. She dampened a corner of the napkin with her tongue, dry paper taste and a hint of refried beans, forcing herself not to think too much about germs, infection passed either way. She wiped at the crust between Spyder’s eyebrows.
“Now we’re in business,” she said and smiled.
The scabby blood peeled away like old paint, and there was the scar, uneven cruciform, white and faded pucker but still perfectly recognizable for what it was.
Niki did not mean to pause, or stare, or allow the small gasp past her lips.
“Wow,” Spyder said, more curiosity than concern. “Is it that bad?” And she raised her fingers and touched the spot between her eyebrows. “Oh,” she said, and nothing then, for a moment, as her fingertips moved over the scar, as if she were reading an old note to herself in Braille, private significance in the raised flesh.
“That,” she said. “I guess I should have warned you. It’s real old.”
“But how,” Niki began, stopped herself, knew she’d already done something, enough, wrong.
“I was a little kid,” as if that explained anything, everything, and Spyder continued rubbing her fingers over the spot as though she hadn’t thought of it in years, fingers rediscovering the intersecting ribbons of scar tissue.
“I’m sorry,” Niki said, shivering, thinking again how terribly cold it was in the “apartment,” not wanting to think about the cross sliced into Spyder’s forehead.
“I was a little kid,” Spyder said again and smiled this time, sheepish it’s-no-big-whup smile. And outside something big and noisy, a garbage truck maybe, growled along the slickening street.
“Most of the time I just forget about it.”
Niki said nothing, wet a clean corner of the napkin and began scrubbing the blood from Spyder’s cheeks.
When the wine was gone, Daria had turned off the lights, curled up with Keith on the bare mattress. Mort was still sitting beside them, slumped against the wall, head back and mouth open, snoring. Id, ego, and superego of Stiff Kitten, drunk and unconscious and, as far as Niki Ky could tell, content with the world. Theo had drifted off into her own fitful sleep beneath Kurt Cobain’s protective glare, anything but content.
Niki had managed to get the worst of the blood off Spyder’s face, found a handful of bruises and scrapes. When Spyder had complained that the metal chair was freezing her ass, first sign of complaint and really more of an observation, they’d sat together on the floor. Huddled together in the window-framed square of light, watching the snow. They talked, quiet talk so they wouldn’t wake anyone: Niki telling the story of her trip from the Carolinas, the death of the Vega and how she’d met Daria, and then, Spyder telling Niki about her tattoos and Weird Trappings.
This is what it would be like to live inside one of those winter paperweight things, Niki thought, picturing the Christmas flurry of fake snow and water, trying to listen to what Spyder was saying. Someone picks up your whole little world and shakes the holy fuck out of it, andthen you just sit there in your plastic cottage and watch the fallout.
She sneezed, then, loud and wet spray, and Spyder wrapped the sleeping bag around them both. It smelled only slightly less than Spyder herself, but the hoarded body heat, the shelter from a thousand drafts, was almost irresistible. And the snow was coming down harder, if there’d been any change at all in the storm in the last hour. Clumpy white flakes pelting the window, reducing the view of the building next door, grainy brickwork and fire-escape zigzag.
Niki yawned, growing even groggier in the sudden warmth.
“Sleepy?” Spyder asked, and Niki thought maybe she heard disappointment, disappointment or guarded alarm.
Niki shook her head, no, not at all, but then she yawned again.
“Maybe just a little,” she said, and “You too?”
“No. I can’t sleep without my meds.”
Something else Niki wouldn’t ask about, not now, better to watch the snow, wait and see if perhaps things would explain themselves further along.
“I didn’t know I wouldn’t be going home tonight,” Spyder said.
Niki nodded, looked over at Keith and Daria, twined in each other’s arms and legs, Mort alone.
“Hell’s slumber party,” she said.
“Yeah,” and Spyder shut her eyes a moment, opened them very slowly, a drawn out, predatory blink.
And through her weariness, Niki was amazed that she felt this comfortable so close to Spyder, someone she’d never even seen just a few hours earlier. More than an absence of discomfort, the pit-of-her-stomach homesickness all but faded away, the dread gone with it, mostly. She felt something like safe, something like peace. And she thought again about whatever they’d exchanged in the parking lot, whatever she might have imagined they�
��d exchanged; frightened at the possibility of it having been real, cautioning herself that it might have been nothing at all. Contradiction all around.
“You must be pretty pissed,” she said, praying her voice wouldn’t break the spell, the calm inside. “Your friends running out on you that way.”
Spyder closed her eyes again, and Niki marveled at her eyelashes, so black after her white hair, long and delicate. Spyder frowned, eyes still closed.
“That was just Byron,” she said, and Niki remembered the terrified face behind the wheel of the Toyota, the boy in his velvet frock coat that she’d watched across Dr. Jekyll’s. “He does that kinda shit. It doesn’t mean anything,” so much stress on that last part before she opened her eyes again. “You don’t count on Byron in a fight, that’s all. I guess he just freaked out.”
“You’re not mad at him?”
And the frown softened, a little of the tension in her face melting away.
“When I catch up with him, I’m gonna kick his skinny faggot ass all the way into next week.”
“Oh,” Niki said, and it was still there, that sense of rightness, something she’d experienced so seldom that it felt like borrowed clothes.
“But what I really want to know is why Joe Cool over there stuck his neck out for me tonight.”
Niki glanced at the mattress again, at Keith Barry, one arm slung protectively or possessively around Daria.
“I think maybe he just likes to fight,” she said.
“Crazy fucking junky. I thought he hated my guts.”
And then Niki turned and looked at Spyder’s eyes, eyes like marble the faintest shade of blue, palest steel, that divine wound between them, and Spyder gave her another long animal blink. And then Niki kissed her. Clumsy kiss, too fast and their noses bumping, urgent and too much force, but Spyder did not pull away, opened her mouth and Niki’s tongue slipped between her teeth, explored cheekflesh and teeth and tongue. Spyder laid one hand against Niki’s face, stubby fingers cold from the chill, and Niki opened her eyes, pulled away. She was breathing too hard, too fast, her heart stumbling, missing beats in her chest.
She’d never kissed a girl before, had kissed no one for what seemed like a very long time. Not since that last morning with Danny; immediate guilt, and Niki pushed his memory away again. Spyder smiled at her, brushed the coarse tips of those fingers across her lips and chin.
“I’m sorry,” Niki said, feeling the warm rush of blood to her face.
“Don’t be sorry,” Spyder said. “It’s okay. But I do have a girlfriend already.”
“I shouldn’t have,” Niki said, and she felt dizzy, the madness and violence of the night and then this, and the snow outside the window playing Caligari tricks with her head. Her exhaustion swimming upstream against the adrenaline flash, gathering itself like the drift piling up on the windowsill. And Spyder still getting in through her nostrils, the leather muskiness and old sweat, stale smoke and something else, sweet and sharp, that might have been Old Spice cologne, her father’s smell.
She shut her eyes, discovering the retinal burn-in of the window and the storm where she’d expected nothing. And then Spyder was talking, words as soft as the worn tapestry of her smells.
“Niki, do you remember when they’d announce on the news that there was a twenty or thirty percent chance of snow, just flurries, you know? But you’d be too excited to sleep because maybe there wouldn’t be school the next day? It was nuts, ’cause it never fucking snows on school nights.
“But you’d stay up all night anyway, all goddamn night, and of course morning would come and there wouldn’t be any snow, and it didn’t matter that you hadn’t slept a wink. You still had to get your ass out from under the covers and go to school anyway. Remember how cheated you felt?”
“It doesn’t snow in New Orleans,” Niki said. “It just rains a lot.”
“Oh,” Spyder said. “That makes sense,” and Niki thought, Yeah, Old Spice, the white bottle in her father’s hand, a spot of white shaving cream behind one ear.
“I think I’m too sleepy to talk anymore, Spyder,” she said. “I’m sorry,” but Spyder didn’t answer, just hugged her closer inside Keith’s skanky sleeping bag. Niki listened to the wind and the pattering sound of the snowfall and later, when she opened her eyes, Spyder was asleep.
2.
Spyder doesn’t know she’s fallen asleep, never knows, so there’s never even that small distance from the rage and his voice and the things that move back there in the corners of the cellar, where the lamp can’t reach.
He raves, opens his rough hand and pours red earth, and she presses her face against moldy army-cot canvas; her mother’s footsteps overhead, heels on the kitchen floorboards, like hopscotch tap dancing, and there’s no comfort at all in the dust that sifts down and settles in her open eyes.
The angels are crawling on the walls, pus dripping from the tips of their blackbird feathers and raw things hung around their necks, things that used to have skin.
“Why do you think they haven’t taken me?” her father wants to know, always wants to know that (and she doesn’t know), and his baggy Top Dollar work pants keep falling down, funny, and that
“Answer me that, Lila! Why won’t they take me?” is really funny and horrible, and it whips back and forth, back and forth, like maybe it wants to tear itself loose from his crotch and come millipede slithering across the dirt floor after her.
Her mother laughs upstairs, and she can hear television voices, too.
She wants to scream, scream that she doesn’t know, she doesn’t fucking know, swear she’d tell him if she did, so he could go. But the dust from his hand fills her mouth, spills over the sides, past lips and chin, gets into her ears, her eyes.
“Goddamn you, Lila,” he says, lips trembling and sweat on his face, glistening slick in the orange light, glistening like the slug trails and shit the angels leave on the cellar walls.
“You make them keep me here, you make them come and watch and laugh and leave. All fly away to Glory without me.”
The dust is sliding down her throat, filling her up, making her his choking hourglass.
“You don’t have the sign,” he says and points, presses his finger so hard against her forehead she thinks it’ll punch on through. “I look at your face, and the sign’s not there, so they can’t take you, Lila. So they won’t take me, either.”
His dust is the World, the binding world, the soil that binds and holds her like roots and the coils of worms, beetle legs, will hold her to the World forever.
“You’re a damned and sinful freak, keeping me here, keeping your mother here,” he howls, the man become a storm of flesh and blood, righteous, and his lightning is taking it all apart; the angels titter and clap their fingerless hands for him, hang from the ceiling and drip drip drip.
The razor blade gleams in the lamplight, kerosene light on stainless steel, and he holds it close to her face, presses a corner of the blade to her forehead and recites the angels’ names. Slices in and draws the razor down
longitude
and the angels are twisting, shriek and rust engine chatter, fishhook teeth gnashing, dripping,
as he pulls the razor out and begins again, second cut, across
latitude.
The blood runs into her eyes, mixes with the dust and burns like saltwater.
“There,” he says, cautious satisfaction, waiting for their approval. But the angels have gone, have slipped back into the walls, and he’s still here. She thinks she can hear their wings far away, wind fluttering kites stretched too tightly over balsa-frail skeletons, the way the kids laugh on the bus to school when they see what he’s done to her.
And he’s still here.
Niki Ky sits next to her, holds her hand; cold air through the bus window as it bounces over railroad tracks, and Niki points at the gray lead clouds hanging low over the city, tells her that if it snows, maybe they can go home early.
Her father has crawled away from her cot, so
bs in a dark corner, shadow hidden, and blames her, blames the bitch he married and his bitch-freak daughter.
And Robin walks past her across the cellar, doesn’t stop when Spyder calls her name, Robin and the ten-penny nails like rusted porcupine quills bristling from her skin, her crimson wrists and ankles, and then she’s gone, swallowed by the unforgiving, hungry earth.
“Is she the one? The one you said you loved?” Niki asks, and Spyder can only nod, too full of dust to speak.
And then there is perfect and absolute blackness, country midnight, and she thinks, This is new. This wasn’t here before. “Before when?” Niki asks with Robin’s voice, Niki an empty universe away. Spyder reaches out, strokes the tangible, rubbery nowhere and nothing and never that wraps her in kindly amoeba folds. Knows that it has come from her, out of her, excreted like sweat or piss or shit, puke or dark menstrual blood.
Her skin itches and goose bumps as big as pencil erasers, and papery crumbling noises from her guts.
Pain that is everywhere and means everything, and she welcomes it with open arms.
At the edge, her edges, at the quivering lips of the concealing, living dark, a single blazing shaft of impossible white, adamantine light singeing the ebon membrane, (“Spyder,” Niki says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that….”) the whiskery little hairs. She smells woodsmoke and ash and burning tires.
And with hands that feel gloved, rubber gloves too small and tight to contain her, she pulls the slit in the starless night closed, and is alone, without Robin or Byron or Walter, without Niki Ky. Without Him.
Sometime before dawn, and the cold and the ache in Spyder’s neck and shoulders woke her; she’d fallen asleep sitting up, hunched over, Niki Ky propped against her. No particular expression on Niki’s sleeping face; peace, maybe, maybe the face of someone who didn’t have nightmares. Not something Spyder would recognize. But no tension in her lips or brows, no frantic REM flutter beneath her eyelids. Spyder watched the snow still falling outside, the drift and swirl, and she wondered if it was true that no two flakes were ever the same.
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