Open your eyes.
The girl, female, human, whatever she was, it didn’t really matter . . . she opened her eyes. The overhead fan was unclear; the blades turned slowly, stopping. Her white ceiling reflected fading afternoon light. The glow was strong, but it was wasting away, dying. (She mulled metaphors, but decided against any real learning experience.)
Just like every other cheap metaphor with lovely empty messages. Cotton candy fortune cookie, replete with nasty sugary finger-tackiness and a slow, sick feeling.
She was hot. She liked being hot, though; several months ago, she woke up startled with unfeeling arms and legs, her body not responding to command. She had the thought that someday she would be dead. Cold, stiff, clotted up in the limbs. She relished heat now, enjoying sweaty moments in satin nightgowns, baking in a benign sunray, perhaps preferring to shudder through 90 degree days in June over fixing the air conditioner. Anything to keep away the dreaded feeling of cold from seeping back into her veins.
I wish I’d never read the Crow or vampire books or gone anywhere other than church, or had divorced parents and a dysfunctional life and talent and misery, or met anyone in my whole life . . . .
The bed was the largest she’d ever had all to herself. A child of hand-me-down twin beds, to her this full-sized monster was adventurous. The sheer history it had, having belonged to a chain smoker for 6 months before the man sold it, moved to North Carolina, and killed himself, was enough encouragement for her to write a small parody of “The Adventures of a Shilling.” When she now lay close to the bare mattress, ear searching for a coiled threat of a heartbeat, nose pressed to floral overcovering, she smelled the familiar cigarette smoke residue. It reminded her of her father.
Of all the people you know who smoke--your brother, your friends and /or their parents, assorted interesting boys, and your granddad--why is it so closely linked to your father?
Her memory of her father was visuals, sounds, and smells. The unchanging hairstyle and beer-belly, and the inherited family nose . . . bushy eyebrows, bottomless brown eyes. Sort of a bass voice, maybe, with maple-syrup-mapped little speeches for everyone in the world, calm telephone voice, professional, country-accented voice, still a sort of facade for the family. His cologne, which stained the clothes in the wash, car exhaust, the seemingly unbroken supply of breathmints, cigarettes. Tobacco--the smoke sending up patterns of threatened health, cancer, emphysema, hacking coughs, perhaps the design of overzealous anti-smoking activists?
Daddy.
Her idols, or whatever, looked at her in paper-mystified wonder from the walls. Singers, actors, poets, and other pieces of sub-mainstream mania. Her collages pointed to the unconcealed fact that she was a certified freak; other betrayers were her books, outnumbered only by the soda cans and drifts of paper (slightly used). No carpet here; crayon drawings were her foot cushions. Her artistic masterpiece hung over her bed. The pretty red alien.
I like the curvy lines, the silver and blue with red, the highlights, the lowlights, the butterfly in the corner. It clashes with the unicorns.
She fumbled on the floor for paper and pen--the cheapest of the former, the best of the latter. Where did she put them? Under last week’s laundry, perhaps?
How can I live like this, mother asks. I don’t live, I perform bodily functions and look after the cat.
Rolling over on the bed, she motioned to the Siamese, who was working hard at keeping an important-looking stack of papers warm. The cat stared, blinked her eyes, and tapped her tail twice before beginning to bathe. Goldfish, the brain said. Next time.
The phone rang. Twice, etc., until the machine picked up. “Hello? Heyyy!” Go away, she thought.
That’s what I’ll put on the tape. That will stop the creditors from politely suggesting legal action for money unpaid. I hate talking to these people, who don’t understand the direct improportion to wages barely above the minimum and the cost of breathing these days. Someday, someone is going to get the cursing of his life.
The CD player was gathering dust in the corner, again. She wasn’t interested in music anymore. No one was, she figured. Of course, there were those who still listened intently, but she knew the score. No more musical masterpieces . . . All her rock posters were old. The younger fools, they still swayed with any lyric, any riff, any drum solo. But she didn’t care for them, or for the faux magic they were inclined to believe in. Delighting in new jazz remix, release, cheap pressings of 2nd rate work, for a week at a time, she tired quickly of low-quality, high-maintenance entertainment.
You don’t have to think about TV, but music takes you there, makes you remember. It holds the flame beneath your nose and dares you to remember the place, the emotion. All the millennia which passed under those notes’s care, all the meaningless little pathetic fuzzy photos of people you think you know, all the evil you’d been thinking, dirty little human.
The sunspot slipped up the wall, like butter gone wacky. A waviness, vague and strange, told tales about the slightly warped glass in the windows of the old, strange house. She was in love with her house until that day . . . her room itself was sinister, promising that it would love her to death . . . . She found the house watching her, waiting for an ironic moment to do her in, with its weak floors and electrical flaws, overrunning bathtubs and trailing heights, rough edges and breakable tree sentries (which had already poked 3 holes in her ceiling, once, when she was a few years younger and away for the night). The house revealed itself to her the day after she knew she would die.
It whispered the names of the house’s dead. It said, “Why won’t you come, too?” But I fled the best way I could; I left on the lights, so it couldn’t take me in the dark, where I was most afraid. I loved my room still, even when the rest of the house had gone rancid; it was sanctuary for me and my little cloud of troubling thoughts. And now I cry in my sleep, now I am alone, and afraid, and abandoned.
Walking through the yard later, an odd thing occurred to her:
This feels just like being at my dad’s house.
Her father had lived, during less prosperous times, in a series of non-permanent-feeling places--a little rented trailer home, a dilapidated farm, a house in town with a hole in the porch and nude women on the storage room’s wallpaper. Now he dwelt in a cookie-cutter neighborhood, replete with gingerbread families and dogs with ticks. She never felt as though she belonged in the neighborhood, nor in the house itself. It was clean; there was an actual decorating plan, and sometimes the furniture or paint or decorations would change; she was visiting so seldom these days . . . .
I used to feel this way at night, when I thought burglars and other bad men were coming to get us, coming to kill the honest Christian and his little family. I used to feel this way when my three siblings and I played basketball on a cold day, when I skateboarded alone along the newly paved road during July noons, when the kids down the street came to play with my brother and stared at my body because I was a teenager. Like we were the only people in the world, or there were too many humans and they were all malevolent, out to get us. Paranoid, I suppose, feelings born of being stranded and yet surrounded most of my life.
The yard yawned at her with a cricket’s mouth; a crew of the beasties played taps as the grass grew dimmer, the sun missing the scraggly leaves in a sloppy way. Or was that just how the lawn had been cut? Neighborhood tomcats stalked the calico with the sleepy eyes, who lay like a colored crescent in the grass; her fur was barely brushed by Sol’s fingers. She was in heat again. The human observer sat on the front porch. Now the traffic was slowing, the oncoming night driving people home or to the local nocturnal hang-outs. In the passing cars were teenagers, both like and unlike her, a motley, myriad collection of contradictions. There were grannies, aunts, and sons, fathers, cousins, and friends. And she watched them, knowing most of them knew where they wanted to be.
I used to be considerably happy here. I used to, I did . . . . Where does this go? Can I be happy at home, in my childhood home, where I became who I am? I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be . . . anywhere. This isn’t real, this doesn’t happen, it hasn’t happened.
The church bells across the street, artificial, carbonated--they chimed eight.
So this is real life--egotistical pain and a soul so empty that religion echoes in there. I can’t wait for college to start, so I’ll have something to do. I wish I were in love, I wish I were in Louisville. I wish I were across the street, in someone else’s life. I don’t want to be me. I DON’T WANNA BE ME.
The tattoo repeated itself as the train whistles blew and a roar of clacking rails told her that more cars were being shipped south, more hauled materials would be available for the masses.
Why am I here. Why do I live. Why do I die. I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.
She buried her head in her arms. Hair formed a string cocoon and made her sweat bead in a small crown on her forehead; the last bit of sun struck her neck before falling to an obstructive cloud and losing itself until the following day. Dusk would set in soon. The house was dark; it loomed behind her like a black bricken forest. The mosquitoes and lightning bugs were out, looking for food and love, parasites and mates. Another slippery metaphor. She forgot to mention it to herself as one small eyeful of saltwater painted her forearms, mingling there with her perspiration.
What am I afraid of?