Willful Creatures

Death Watch

Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don’t know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands. The doctor comes out of his office and apologizes, to the dead man.

Dang it, he says sheepishly, to his colleagues. Looks like I got the date wrong again.

One can’t account for murder or accidents, says another doctor in his bright white coat.

The raging, sad men and the smiling man all leave the office. The smiling man does not know why he is smiling. He just feels relieved. He was suicidal anyway. Now it’s out of his hands. The others growl at him, their bare hands blood specked, but the smiler is eerie in his relief, and so they let him be, thinking he might somehow speed up their precious two weeks. The raging men tear out the door first; the crying men follow.

On their way they meet up with a field of cows. The cows are chewing quietly and calmly. The sight of the cows fills the crying men with sadness as they only have two weeks left to look at cows. But the sight of the cows fills the raging men with more rage. After all, why are the cows so calm? Why is it that cows get to remain ignorant of their own death? Why is the sky so blue and peaceful? The raging men run to the cows but the cows don’t notice; the cows want, more than anything, just to continue chewing. One raging man collapses in the field and drums it with his fists. The others run and run. The five crying men stand at the fence, crying. Look at the sad and large rage of the doomed men, they think. Who knew a cow was so beautiful? Why was I not a farmer? Why not a field hand? Why an office building?

Back at the office building, the doctors check their notebooks and discover an error. Oops. Only two of the five crying men need to be crying. The other three are in perfect health. The doctors, embarrassed, call up their patients who are by then crying into the arms of their crying wives or lovers or pets.

We have some good news! they say. We made a goof. You seem to be in perfect health. Very sorry about that.

One crying man, new lease on life, moves his family to the countryside where they raise goats.

The other two go back to their regular routines. A close call.

The last raging man still is drumming his fists on the field. His lover calls out into the darkness of the night. The lover understands that his angry man is out there raging against the world again, this is to be expected, but he does not understand why the doctor keeps calling.

The suicidal one is another error, but he is impossible to contact. He has flown by now to Greece and is trying finally to have a relationship. With only a couple of weeks left, he thinks that for once he has a good chance of having someone by his bedside when he dies.

The two remaining crying men die. One with tubes, the other in his own bed. One of the raging men dies, roaring in his bathtub. Another, though not a mistake, still drums that field with his fists. The very energy it takes should drain him dry, but no. He is happily drumming. He drums for weeks and sits up and isn’t yet dead. It takes him six months, which he uses to make some angry paintings that are beloved by people in galleries who are unaware that they themselves are angry at all.

The Greek woman sobs when she hears that her wonderful melancholy lover will be dying soon. They do ritual after ritual. Their sex is like castles; it has moats and turrets. If only, thinks the suicidal man, if only I had known for longer how short it all would be.

Everybody says this. They say it for us, the nondying, to remember our daily lives. But we can’t fully get it until we’re right up in the face of it. Can we get it? It is hard to get. I do not get it. Only the suicidal man gets it here, and his Greek lover with her aquiline nose.

On the morning of the third week, the Greek woman returns to her bedroom with a bouquet of mourning flowers. She has prepared herself on the walk over for the cold body. She can still feel him inside her. In the bedroom, her lover says hello. He feels curiously fine. The Greek woman falls to her knees and calls him a miracle. They have miracle sex, in honor of miracles. But the next day happens the same and both are giddy with joy tinged by the slightest bit of disappointment which they hide behind their love and delight. And then the next day, and soon the sex is not the same as before. No longer a castle, now just a hut. The Greek woman’s husband is due back soon anyway, from his voyage to get silk from China. The suicidal man goes to the sea to bathe. Some cows walk by, chewing. He can feel his heart, like the strongest machine, and his deathbedside fading.

He takes the plane back home and gets off at the layover city, a city he does not know. He’d bought himself a return ticket even though he’d assumed, even hoped, he would die in Greece, among clean-washed buildings and simple color contrast that is enough to satisfy everything: White on blue. Yellow on blue. Red on white. He had planned on giving his return ticket to his Greek lover in case she needed to escape her husband and set up a new life in America. She was not thrilled, though, by his generous offer. Thank you, she’d said, but I do not like this television all the time.

The stopover from Athens is in Denver. Not what he pictured. A place he has never been. He grew up elsewhere, not in or by mountains. So, so, so. Let’s walk over the streets, he says to himself, and the first for rent sign he sees, he takes. He does everything the minute he thinks it-that is, all except suicide. He does not want to be cheated of his terminal illness.

His illness is not terminal; instead it is temporary. He never speaks to the doctors who try to leave a message but discover that the mechanical lady is now answering his phone. But he figures it out on his own. He thinks possibly he’s one of those people who will live forever but when he cuts himself shaving he bleeds so profusely he spells out MORTAL in the sink’s basin with his blood. He joins a gym. The world of Denver fills him up with coffee in the morning and walks in the afternoon. He is spending all his money.

Eventually he calls his doctor, because he’s too curious. He explains to the secretary how he was told he had two weeks to live and now it’s three years later. The doctor, he hears, has died. From guilt perhaps? No. The doctor was in a skiing accident.

You can’t account for events like that, he says to himself, going outside to appreciate the simple color contrast of Colorado: Brown on blue. Green on brown.

It feels like a trade-off, even though it wasn’t. He returns to his hometown the next day. There he finds the doctor’s wife and life and he seduces her with his depressive charm. He is a good new stepparent. One afternoon the Greek woman shows up on his doorstep. I have left my husband, she says. I miss you my darling and your delicate fingertips.

He is brimming with abundance but it’s too late for all of them. When the bomb hits, the doctors shake their heads at each other as their bodies disintegrate.

You can never account, they say, for murder, or for accidents.

They are all, at once, at each other’s deathbeds.

End of the Line

The man went to the pet store to buy himself a little man to keep him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small attractive brown-haired man, wearing a tweed suit. He looked at the price tag. The little man was expensive but the big man had a reliable job and thought this a worthy purchase.

He brought the cage up to the front, paid with his credit card, and got some free airline points.

In the car, the little man’s cage bounced lightly on the passenger seat, held by the seat belt.

The big man set up the little man in his bedroom, on the nightstand, and lifted the latch of the cage open. That’s the first time the little man looked away from the small TV. He blinked, which was hard to see, and then asked for some dinner in a high shrill voice. The big man brought the little man a drop of whiskey inside the indented crosshatch of a screw, and a thread of chicken with the skin still on. He had no utensils, so he told the little man to feel free to eat with his hands, which made the little man irritable. The little man explained that before he’d been caught he’d been a very successful and refined technology consultant who’d been to Paris and Milan multiple times, and that he liked to eat with utensils thank you very much. The big man laughed and laughed, he thought this little man he’d bought was so funny. The little man told him in a clear crisp voice that dollhouse stores were open on weekends and he needed a bed, please, with an actual pillow, please, and a lamp and some books with actual pages if at all possible. Please. The big man chuckled some more and nodded.

The little man sat on his sofa. He stayed up late that first night, laughing his high shrill laugh at the late-night shows, which annoyed the big man to no end. He tried to sleep and could not, a wink. At four a.m., exhausted, the big man put some antihistamine in the little man’s water-drip tube, so the little man finally got drowsy. The big man accidentally put too much in, because getting the right proportions was no easy feat of mathematical skill, which was not the big man’s strong suit anyway, and the little man stayed groggy for three days, slugging around his cage, leaving tiny drool marks on the couch. The big man went to work and thought of the little man with longing all day, and at five o’clock he dashed home, so excited he was to see his little man, but he kept finding the fellow in a state of murk. When the antihistamine finally wore off, the little man awoke with crystal-clear sinuses, and by then had a fully furnished room around him, complete with chandelier and several very short books, including Cinderella in Spanish, and his very own pet ant in a cage.

The two men got along for about two weeks. The little man was very good with numbers and helped the big man with his bank statements. But between bills, the little man also liked to talk about his life back home and how he’d been captured on his way to work, in a bakery of all places, by the little-men bounty hunters, and how much he, the little man, missed his wife and children. The big man had no wife and no children, and he didn’t like hearing that part. “You’re mine now,” he told the little man. “I paid good money for you.”

“But I have responsibilities,” said the little man to his owner, eyes dewy in the light.

“You said you’d take me back,” said the little man.

“I said no such thing,” said the big man, but he couldn’t remember if he really had or not. He had never been very good with names or recall.

After about the third week, after learning the personalities of the little man’s children and grandparents and aunts and uncles, after hearing about the tenth meal in Paris and how le waiter said the little man had such good pronunciation, after a description of singing tenor arias with a mandolin on the train to Tuscany, the big man took to torturing the little man. When the little man’s back was turned, the big man snuck a needle-thin droplet of household cleanser into his water and watched the little man hallucinate all night long, tossing and turning, retching small pink piles into the corners of the cage. His little body was so small it was hard to imagine it hurt that much. How much pain could really be felt in a space that tiny? The big man slept heavily, assured that his pet was just exaggerating for show.

The big man started taking sick days at work.

He enjoyed throwing the little man in the air and catching him. The little man protested in many ways. First he said he didn’t like that in a firm fatherly voice, then he screamed and cried. The man didn’t respond so the little man used reason, which worked briefly, saying: “Look, I’m a man too, I’m just a little man. This is very painful for me. Even if you don’t like me,” said the little man, “it still hurts.” The big man listened for a second, but he had come to love flicking his little man, who wasn’t talking as much anymore about the art of the baguette, and the little man, starting to bruise and scar on his body, finally shut his mouth completely. His head ached and he no longer trusted the water.

He considered his escape. But how? The doorknob is the Empire State Building. The backyard is an African veldt.

The big man watched TV with the little man. During the show with the sexy women, he slipped the little man down his pants and just left him there. The little man poked at the big man’s penis which grew next to him like Jack’s beanstalk in person, smelling so musty and earthy it made the little man embarrassed of his own small penis tucked away in his consultant pants. He knocked his fist into it, and the beanstalk grew taller and, disturbed, the big man reached down his pants and flung the little man across the room. The little man hit a table leg. Woke up in his cage, head throbbing. He hadn’t even minded much being in the underwear of the big man, because for the first time since he’d been caught, he’d felt the smallest glimmer of power.

“Don’t you try that again,” warned the big man, head taking up the north wall of the cage entirely.

“Please,” said the little man, whose eyes were no longer dewy but flat. “Sir. Have some pity.”

The big man wrapped the little man up in masking tape, all over his body, so his feet couldn’t kick and there were only little holes for his mouth and his eyes. Then he put him in the refrigerator for an hour. When he came back the little man had fainted and the big man put him in the toaster oven, at very very low, for another ten minutes. Preheated. The little man revived after a day or two.

“Please,” he said to the big man, word broken.

The big man didn’t like the word please. He didn’t like politesse and he didn’t like people. Work had been dull and no one had noticed his new coat. He got himself a ticket to Paris with all the miles he’d accumulated on his credit card, but soon realized he could not speak a word of the language and was too afraid of accidentally eating veal brains to go. He did not want to ask the little man to translate for him as he did not want to hear the little man’s voice with an accent. The thought of it made him so angry. The ticket expired, unreturned. On the plane, a young woman stretched out on her seat and slept since no one showed up in the seat next to hers. At work, he asked out an attractive woman he had liked for years, and she ran away from him to tell her coworkers immediately. She never even said no; it was so obvious to her, she didn’t even have to say it.

“Take off your clothes,” he told the little man that afternoon.

The little man winced and the big man held up a bottle of shower cleanser as a threat. The little man stripped slowly, folded his clothing, and stood before the big man, his skin pale, his chest a matted grass of hair, his penis hiding, his lips trembling so slightly that only the most careful eye would notice.

“Do something,” said the big man.

The little man sat on the sofa. “What,” he said.

“Get hard,” said the big man. “Show me what you look like.”

The little man’s head was still sore from hitting the table leg; his brain had felt fuzzy and indistinct ever since he’d spent the hour in the refrigerator and then time in the toaster oven. He put his hand on his penis and there was a heavy sad flicker of pleasure and behind the absolute dullness of his mind, his body rose up to the order.

The big man laughed and laughed at the erection of his little man, which was fine and true but so little! How funny to see this man as a man. He pointed and laughed. The little man stayed on the sofa and thought of his wife, who would go into the world and collect the bottle caps strewn on the ground from the big people and make them into trays; she’d spend hours upon hours filing down the sharp edges and then use metallic paint on the interior and they were the envy of all the little people around, so beautiful they were and so hearty. No one else had the patience to wear down those sharp corners. Sometimes she sold one and made a good wad of cash. The little man thought of those trays, trays upon trays, red, blue, and yellow, until he came in a small spurt, the orgasm pleasureless but thick with yearning.

The big man stopped laughing.

“What were you thinking about?” he said.

The little man said nothing.

“What’s your wife like?” he said.

Nothing.

“Take me to see her,” the big man said.

The little man sat, naked, on the floor of his cage. He had changed by now. Cut off. He would have to come back, a long journey back. He’d left.

“See who?” he asked.

The big man snickered. “Your wife,” he said.

The little man shook his head. He looked wearily at the big man. “I’m the end of this line for you,” he said.

It was the longest sentence he’d said in weeks. The big man pushed the cage over and the little man hit the side of the sofa.

“Yes!” howled the big man. “I want to see your children too. How I love children!”

He opened the cage and took the little floral-print couch into his hand. The little man’s face was still and cold.

“No,” he said, eyes closed.

“I will torture you!” cried out the big man.

The little man folded his hands under his cheek in a pillow. Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom. “No,” he whispered into his knuckles.

With his breath clouding warmly over his hands, the little man waited, half dizzy, to be killed. He felt his death was terribly insignificant and a blip but he still did not look forward to being killed and he sent waves of love to his wife and his children, to the people who made him significant, to the ones who felt the blip.

The big man played with the legs of the little armchair. He took off the pillow and found a few coins inside the crevices, coins so small he couldn’t even pick them up.

He put his face close to the cage of his little man.

“Okay,” he said.

Four days later, he set the little man free. He treated him well for the four days, gave him good food and even a bath and some aspirin and a new pillow. He wanted to leave him with some positive memories and an overall good impression. After four days, he took the cage under his arm, opened the front door, and set it out on the sidewalk. Unlocked the cage door. The little man had been sleeping nonstop for days, with only a few lucid moments staring into the giant eye of the big man, but the sunlight soaked into him instantly, and he awoke. He exited the cage door. He waited for a bird to fly down and eat him. Not the worst death, he thought. Usually the little people used an oil rub that was repellent-smelling to birds and other animals, but all of that, over time, had been washed clean off him. He could see the hulking form of the big man to his right, squatting on his heels. The big man felt sad but not too sad. The little man had become boring. Now that he was less of a person, he was easier to get along with and less fun to play with. The little man tottered down the sidewalk, arms lifting oddly from his sides, as if he had wet hands or was covered in paint. He did not seem to recognize his own body.

At the curb, he sat down. A small blue bus drove up, so small the big man wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking at foot level already. The little man got on. He had no money but the bus revved for a moment and then moved forward with the little man on it. He took a seat in the back and looked out the window at the street. All the little people around him could smell what had happened. They lived in fear of it every day. The newspapers were full of updates and new incidents. One older man with a trim white beard moved across the bus to sit next to the little man and gently put an arm on his shoulder. Together they watched the gray curbs passing by.

On the lawn, the big man thought the bus was hilarious and walked next to it for a block. Even the tires rolled perfectly. He thought how if he wanted to, he could step on that bus and smush it. He did not know that the bus was equipped with spikes so sharp they would drive straight through a rubber sole, into the flesh of the foot. For a few blocks he held his foot over it, watching bus stops come up, signs as small as toothpicks, but then he felt tired and went to the corner and let the bus turn and sat down on the big blue plastic bus bench on his corner made for the big people.

When his bus came, he took it. It was Saturday. He took it to the very end of the line. Here the streets were littered with trash, and purple mountains anchored the distance. Everything felt like it was closing in, and even the store signs seemed too bright and overwhelming. He instantly didn’t like it, this somewhere he had never been before, with a different smell, that of a sweeter flower and a more rustic bread. The next bus didn’t come for an hour so he began the steady walk home, eyes glued to the sidewalk.

He just wanted to see where they lived. He just wanted to see their little houses and their pets and their schools. He wanted to see if they each had cars or if buses were the main form of transport. He hoped to spot a tiny airplane.

“I don’t want to harm you!” he said out loud. “I just want to be a part of your society.”

His eyes moved across grasses and squares of sidewalk. He’d always had excellent vision.

“In exchange for seeing your village,” he said out loud, “I will protect you from us. I will guard your front gates like a watchdog!” He yelled it into the thorny shadows of hedges, down the gutter, into the wet heads of sprinklers.

All he found was a tiny yellow hat with a ribbon, perched perfectly on the yellow petal of a rose. He held it for a good ten minutes, admiring the fine detail of the handiwork. There was embroidery all along the border. The rim of the hat was the size of the pad of his thumb. Everything about him felt disgusting and huge. Where are the tall people, the fatter people? he thought. Where are the aliens the size of God?

Finally, he sat down on the sidewalk.

“I’ve found a hat!” he yelled. “Please! Come out! I promise I will return it to its rightful owner.”

Nestled inside a rock formation, a group of eight little people held hands. They were on their way to a birthday party. Tremendous warmth generated from one body to the other. They could stand there forever if they had to. They were used to it. Birthdays came and went. Yellow hats could be resewn. It was not up to them to take care of all the world, whispered the mother to the daughter, whose yellow dress was unmatched, whose hand thrummed with sweat, who watched the giant outside put her hat on his enormous head and could not understand the size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart.

Off

At the party I make a goal and it is to kiss three men: one with black hair, one with red hair, the third blond. Not necessarily in that order. I’m alone at the party and I have my drink in a mug because by the time I got here, at the ideal moment of lateness, the host had used all her bluish glasses with fluted stems that she bought from the local home-supply store that all others within a ten-block radius had bought too because at some inexplicable point in time, everybody woke up with identical taste. I see two matching sweaters and four similar handbags. It’s enough to make you want to buy ugly except other people are having that reaction too and I spot three identically ugly pairs of shoes. There’s just nowhere to hide. I know the host here from high-school time and she likes to invite me to things because for one, she feels sorry for me and for two, she finds me entertaining and blushes when I cuss. It’s how we flirt.

About half the people here are in couples. I stand alone because I plan on making all these women jealous, reminding them how incredible it is to be single instead of always being with the same old same old except tonight I am jealous too because all their men are seeming particularly tall and kind on this foggy wintery night and one is wearing a shirt a boyfriend of mine used to own with that nubby terry-cloth material recycled from soda cans and it smells clean from where I’m standing, ten feet away, and it’s not a good sign when something like a particular laundry detergent can just like that undo you.

From here, against the wall, I can survey the whole living room. TV, couch, easy plant. The walls are covered with pastel posters of gardens by famous painters who rediscovered light and are now all over address books and umbrellas and mugs. Is it really worth it to dead earless van Gogh that his painting now holds some person’s catalog of phone numbers? Is that what he wanted when he fought through personal hell to capture the sun in Arles? I used to paint and I would make landscapes that were peaceful and my teacher would stroll through the easels and praise me and say, “What a lovely cornfield, dear,” but she never looked hard enough because if you did you would see that each landscape had something bad in it and that lovely was the wrong word to use: I made that cornfield, true, but if you looked closely, there was a glinting knife hanging from each husk. And I made a beach scene with crashing waves and a crescent moon and then this loaded machine gun lying on the sand by a towel; and then I made a mountain town with quaint stores and tall pine trees and people walking around except for that one man wrapped in dynamite walking over to the guy with the cigarette lighter standing by the drinking fountain.

The terrible thing is that the teacher never figured it out. And she saw all three paintings. She actually thought the guy in dynamite was wearing some strange puffy suit and that the corn was just very glinty. She said the machine gun was a nice kite. When the evaluation sheets came around, I said she was useless and should be fired.

The couples are shifting positions and I’m ready now and I find that redhead first. Lucky for me he is drunk already and sitting in a chair with pretzels and he’s talking to no one because he’s on break from being social because he is so drunk. I saunter over and ask him to help me look for my purse in the bedroom. “I lost my purse,” I say to him. “Help.” He blinks, eyelids heavy with the eye shadow of alcohol, and then he follows me into the bedroom which is covered with people’s items: twenty-five coats and half as many purses. I am rich but I consider stealing some of the stuff because they are so trusting, these people, and I feel like wrecking their trust. But where would I stash a coat? We are looking around for my make-believe purse because I don’t use a purse at all; when I go out, I just carry keys and slip one one-hundred-dollar bill into the arch of my shoe and let the night unroll from there. We’re mumbling in the bedroom and I pretend I’m drunker than I am and then I ask him, right there, among all the coats, if he thinks I’m pretty. His eyes are bleary and he smiles and says, “Yeah, yeah.” We’re standing by the bed, and I lean over and I kiss him then, really gentle because at any minute he could throw up all over me, and his lips are dry and we spend a few minutes like that, gentle kisses on his dry lips, and then he starts to laugh and I am offended. “Why are you laughing?” I ask, and he laughs more, and I sort of push him and pick up one of the better coats on the bed, with a shiny lined inside of burgundy, and I put it on for a second even though I’m not cold and I ask him again why he laughed and he says, “We went to grade school together,” and I say, “We did? We did?” and he tells me his name and then he tells me my name and I apologize because I don’t remember him. “I remember you because you were the one with the inheritance,” he says, and I tell him I was really good at painting too and he says, “Really? I don’t remember that.”

So I am through with him.

I take off the coat and throw it back on the bed and then head to the door.

“Wait, why did you kiss me?” he asks, and I know it is taking a big effort for him to string this sentence together because he is so drunk. “Let’s go out sometime,” he slurs. “I just laughed because it’s funny, it’s funny. To kiss someone you knew as a kid. It’s funny.”

I turn around and he looms above me and I can see the freckles on his collarbone and that means he has a chest of freckles and a back of freckles and knees of freckles and freckled inner thighs and I was the best artist in grade school for several years until that dumb girl moved here from Korea, and he is laughing more because he knew me as a little kid and is remembering something and I barely remember what it was like to be a little kid so it seems rude that he would recall something about me that I couldn’t myself. If I can’t remember it, then it should mean no one else can either.

“No,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go out with you, ever.”

And I’m back in the main room. I return to the same wall. The redhead follows me out and collapses back into that chair, staring, but I ignore him and look at the table of food instead. The guacamole dip is at half, and there are little shit-green blobs on the tablecloth. The brie is a white cave. The wineglasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom. I go refill my glass and the redhead closes his eyes in the chair. One down.

The blond is next, and he is someone I used to date and in fact only broke up with around three months ago so I think it’ll be easy; I find him in the corner talking to two other guys and I glide over and because I am me I am wearing an incredible dress tonight; this one looks almost like it is made of metal; it has this slinky way of falling all over my hips and I feel like an on faucet in it and of course I am the most dressed up at the party, I always am, but that’s the whole point, so when the host inevitably looks down at her everybodyownsthemjeans at the front door and says, “Oh, but it’s not a formal party,” I smile at her with as many teeth as I can fit and wink and say, “That’s fine, that’s fine, I just felt like wearing this tonight.” Inevitably, the next time I see that same host she has more lipstick on or a new glittering necklace her mother bought her but lady she is dust next to me inside this silverness. I am now almost right behind the blond man who broke up with me because he didn’t feel loved and it was true, I did not love him, but he is the type to never go out with someone for a long time anyway so we would’ve broken up soon regardless and I just gave us a good excuse. I am next to him by now and I tell him we need to talk and could we go in the bathroom? He is confused for a minute but then agrees, and says “Hang on” to his friends who shake their heads because they remember me well and think he’s being stupid and they’re right but we go into the bathroom and I say, “Adam, I have a goal to kiss you tonight,” and he says, “C’mon, is that what this is about?” and I tell him to come here but he has his hand on the doorknob but also he’s not gone yet. “You’re incredible,” he says, shaking his head, and I feel mad, what does he mean, it’s not a compliment, and he’s out the door. And he’s out the door, then. I’m alone in the bathroom and I’m sitting on the sink and my butt is falling a little into the sink part, faucet on faucet, and I turn around to myself in the medicine-cabinet mirror and check my teeth and they are bright and white because last week I bought a new tooth cleaner and it’s working and my eyeliner isn’t smeared because I bought the new eyeliner that swears it won’t smear or you can sue the company, and I’m sitting there plotting my next blond when Adam comes back into the bathroom with determination and closes the door firmly. “You’re just playing with me, aren’t you?” he says, and I say, “Yeah,” and he sighs a little. “At least you’re honest,” he says, and I say, “Thanks, I try to be honest, I do, that is one of my good qualities.” He waits there by the door and I hop off the sink to go to him, stand and face him, and he’s not running away so I’m moving in and then we’re kissing, that easy, and his lips are the same ones I know well, in fact he was my longest boyfriend so I know his lips better than anyone’s, and his upper lip is much thinner than his lower lip which I always liked and I kiss that pillow at the bottom and we kiss and it gets more, we keep kissing and I remember just what it’s like and I am suddenly feeling like I miss him and I am remembering everything of what it’s like to be with him and I am forgiving him for everything and we’re still kissing and his teeth and his smell and we’ve been kissing too long now, it’s gone on long enough, so I pull away. He has lipstick on the edges of his mouth. “Okay,” I say, “thank you, okay.” He looks shook up but also wants more and he has the same feeling I do; he felt the room change into a different room during that kiss but I’m trying to get it back to being the first room, the one where I know it all. His hands are all over my silver dress slip-sliding around and the bathroom door opens, it’s some lady who wants to use the bathroom and she sees us and blushes and I’m glad I don’t know her because I don’t want the whole party to know I’m in the bathroom kissing a blond while I still have a black-haired man to finish the night with. Adam is wiping the lipstick off now and his hand is still on my dress, on my hip; “You’re a cold woman,” he says to me, and then his hand is gone and he leaves and I am left in there again and I know I am not a cold woman because the whole point of why it was hard for him to leave just then is because I am a not-cold woman but I resent the lie anyway. I check myself in the mirror again and my skin has sharpened and the teeth and eyeliner are all still good and I am thinking about him for a minute, thinking about how when he came inside me and I came outside him he would say something like “This is it,” and I’d think, It’s the end of the world, and then we’d finish up and be sweating and hot and the world would still be there, like it had swung up and met us. And when we slept then it was so deep it really could’ve been the end of the world with sirens and megaphones and panicked TV people and I know at least for myself I wouldn’t have even noticed.

I exit the bathroom after I’ve used it and the lady who interrupted is standing there and she is embarrassed and I am not and I step on her foot as I walk out and she says, “Oops, sorry,” like all women do and I am mad at that because it was my fault so why is she apologizing? and I hate that she said “Oops” in that little meek voice and now I’m in a bad mood. And I still have one flavor to go. It’s an hour later now and the guacamole is gone and the brie is all shell and these stupid people don’t know that the white part of brie is important to the taste, that it doesn’t count if you only eat the mushy inside, that the French would leave en masse if they came to this party and saw the Americans carving out their cheese like cave dwellers, but the party people only like easy cheese, and easy jeans, and they are all sipping from their fluted glasses and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water. Adam is back with his friends and he won’t look at me and they are sheltering him like a little male righteous wall and the redhead is gone by now or passed out somewhere and I am looking for black hair, looking, looking, and you’d think it’d be easy considering something like four-fifths of the entire earth has black hair and I do find one prospect but he seems harsh and too talkative so I pass him up and I find a cute black guy but he seems to be one of the married ones and I am trying to keep this as simple as possible and I’m looking, still looking, then bingo: it’s the tallest man in the room. He has sharp black hair over his ears and glasses and a swarthiness and he is the smarty guy and he is talking to a woman who is clearly entranced by him, but remember: I am a column of mercury, and this woman is wearing a blouse and khaki pants, drinking water from a mug imprinted with water lilies. The deal is done.

She is telling him about her job at a pet hospital. She is a vet of sorts. Every person on earth likes a vet except me, because I think there are too many animals in the first place. And when these vets keep saving the sick animals, we are just stuck with more.

“These are from the last cat,” she is saying, holding up her arm which is covered with raised tracks.

He nods, observes. I, however, am not interested in her fake drug habit look-alike war wounds. I bet a thousand dollars she grew up with a dog who had a name with a y or an ie at the end. I had a dog once, a big dog, a Great Dane, and I named him Off so when I called him, I said “Off!” and he came bounding over. It really fucked with people’s heads. At the dog park no one got it. They kept trying to figure out how I did that, if I was okay, what was happening. I was laughing all the time at the dog park. I wore dresses there too and I think people brought their friends to see me, like I was a sight in the city, a tourist attraction. If I was forty it’d be a problem but I’m not so they adore me. Off died early because he was a purebred but I didn’t put him to sleep, I kept him company and stroked his big forehead until I saw his eyes shut on their own. I had him cremated. I sprinkled most of his ashes into my plants, but fed a few of the remaining ones to the cat next door because she had always been tormented by Off’s size and I thought it was a little bit of sweet vindication.

It’s nearly midnight, and I’m waiting for the man here to say something so I can form my game plan. Adam is talking to a woman now and I can tell he is appearing extra animated to get my goat. I can only see the woman’s butt from here, but it’s very flat and Adam is an ass man so I’m not worried. I don’t shrivel up into wiggly jealousy. Instead I feel like thrusting through all the women here, stepping on all those dainty toes, releasing a chorus of “Oops, sorries,” a million apologies for something I did wrong.

The vet is still talking. “Last week,” she is saying, “the sweetest beagle came in with some kind of dementia and I had to put him to sleep …”

“That must be tough,” he says, “to put a dog to sleep.”

I’m underneath the yellow-and-pink floral painting. Fuck me, I’m thinking. She is taking too damn long. At the door, one of the couples is saying goodbye to the host. Her hand is on his elbow. The host looks dampened; I think somebody broke her stereo.

And suddenly, in a wash, I am feeling low. I am feeling like there is nothing in this whole party for me and I want everyone to leave now. I’m thinking about how when I filled out the evaluation for the painting teacher, and I said she should be fired, I made sure to sign my name. I’ve given some money to the university-not enough to get a building named after me, but close. And when the next session rolled around and I looked for her name in the catalog, I couldn’t find it anywhere. My final painting for the class was that-the catalog page without her name in it.

“Oh,” she had said, “isn’t that a delightful picture of the sea.”

I slump a little on the wall. The red-haired man is back, asleep in his chair. Vet says, “I feel like I’m a prison guard or something with all this lethal-injection stuff.”

And then the man says something about how he worked in a prison once and he saw a lethal injection once and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen and I perk up then, rejuvenated, because that’s all I need to know; I figure now if he worked in a prison then he has sympathy with people who are trapped or bad and just like that my plan is set.

So I smile at both of them as I move away from the wall in a silvery wave and he notices me then, how can he not, and he nods and khaki vet is off talking again and I interrupt and say, “I have to do something,” and the vet is surprised that I can talk and gives me a snotty look down her I-never-got-past-my-childhood-dream nose, and I say, to him only, “Hey, if I’m not back here in a couple minutes, will you check on me?”

He nods, unsure what I mean. She slivers her eyes at me. I open mine wide back, because eye slivering is for old hags. I’m not sure about the details of my plan yet but I step past Adam who is still talking to that unfuckable woman with no ass and I go into the bedroom. I’m planning on stealing something, but I’m not sure what to steal that would make him come find me. I survey the bed. I could steal all the wallets but it seems too unoriginal and detailed so I decide to do the thing I wanted to do with the red-haired man and that is to steal all the coats. I lean over and scoop them together, wool ones and tweed ones and velvet ones and cotton ones, and pick them up in a huge stack, my arms a belt, so heavy they make me stagger, and I go inside the bedroom closet with them and shut the door until I am smothered with coats. It’s hot in here, and it smells like shoe polish. I arrange myself underneath the billion coats and then I wait for either the black-haired man to remember to hunt for me or someone else to get ready to leave the party. After just a few minutes, there are footsteps in the bedroom and it’s two people and they’re ready to bundle up for outdoors and go back to where they live and of course they cannot find their coats and it’s winter and they are certain they brought coats. So they leave the room and return to the host and I can hear her quizzical voice going up. “Coats? Bedroom.” Her tone is always so sincere. In high school her mother wouldn’t let her shop at certain stores because they were too expensive and too slutty and so I would take her shopping and buy her a blue leather miniskirt or a sheer black slip and she would try them on at my house in the ultra-mirrored bathroom and model and pose. She refused to wear them out. She just wore them for me. She has this compact body and looked sporty in everything and I told her compliment after compliment and we never touched but she still always blushed like crazy. There was this one dress of white feathers and she looked like a whole different genre of person inside it. It would’ve made my entire high school worthwhile if she’d worn that to her prom but she could hardly leave the bathroom and her face was bright red so that between her and the dress I was reminded of a peppermint. I never took those outfits back to the store; I kept them for a few of her visits and when she seemed bored of them or started to guilt-trip me and ask how much they cost, I gave them to Goodwill. Goodwill, for good reason, loved me. And my head is leaning back on a soft coat of lamb’s wool and I can hear the talking outside getting louder and I’m thinking that the reason I kept going out with Adam in the first place was because when I showed him my painting of the ocean in my living room, on our second date, when I was wearing peach velvet, long sleeves, super plunging low neck, he looked at it for about one second and said, “Lady, you are screwed UP.” And even though I was a little bit insulted, I was also ridiculous with gratitude and I took off my clothes right there, in one smooth movement, unzipped that peach velvet to show a different kind of peach, a different kind of velvet. Within seconds he was kissing my shoulders and my side and the inside of my knee and he told me to stay standing for a while then and I felt like the tallest person ever born. And by now the couple is back in the bedroom and the party is filtering into the bedroom because they know something is wrong and they are all wondering where all the coats are and someone is getting upset, someone with an expensive coat and I reach out my hand and grope around until I find it. Cashmere. It smells like a woman, like expensive perfume, but not as rich as me; me, I buy perfume so expensive it doesn’t smell like anything but skin. And they are panicking and someone is saying how the pocket of her coat has her keys in it and she’s asking, “Who is missing? Who took the coats?” and I am touching the pocket with the keys, it’s near my foot, and I hear Adam call my name and I am quiet but he is thinking, It’s her, she is somewhere hiding with coats, and he excuses himself from flat butt but I don’t want to see him ever again, I want the black-haired man to find me so I can kiss him and get home already. I close my eyes, hoping that when he opens the closet he will find me sleeping and I’ll wake, disoriented; I’ll tell him in a delightfully raspy voice that I was cold and needed a blanket and he will think I’m a nut or drunk but also he will be moved somehow and we’ll start kissing in the bottom of the closet and he will have intuitive knowledge about my mouth, and I am hearing footsteps approach the closet, heavy ones, male ones, nearby, someone is approaching the closet and it’s opening a crack and then it’s open but I can’t see who’s there because my eyes are closed and then it’s the black-haired man, it is, I can tell because he says “Oh,” and I recognize his deep voice. I reach up a hand because I want to drag him in here-I am stuck, I am bad, it’s jail, it’s just like you like-but instead, he calls out, “Hey! I Found The Coats!” really loud, and then I pretend to wake up and say “Oh, hi, what? I was just cold,” and the host comes by and when she sees me it’s like I’m her troublesome dog-pet and she says “I’m so sorry,” and the black-haired man points me out and says, “Here You Are, Miss,” like he’s a bellhop locating luggage and I explain how I was cold and the coat couple reach in the closet as if I’m not even in it and fuss around and retrieve their coats and then they’re off and everyone else is taking their coats really fast in case I’m somehow going to eat them and it’s a time-limit thing and coat after coat is picked up until I’m coatless and just myself in my dress and I feel truly cold now and bare and small and then Adam is standing there in the crowd, and he says, “I’ll take it from here,” and I think that’s so fatherly of him it makes me feel sort of sick also because it makes me feel sort of good and the host asks what I was doing, and for the third or fourth time I say I was cold, I just thought I’d be warmer with all these coats. I make my eyes blurry. And she buys it. She thinks I’m that plain drunk from her affordable-yet-delicious wine. And the black-haired man buys it too and nods but then turns around and goes back to the other room to talk to the vet. He leaves the drunk crazy lady behind and returns to the conservative animal lover. And it’s just Adam there now, standing with his familiar face, who knows I wasn’t cold or drunk, standing there as everyone clears out and he tells me to get up and pulls me when I don’t and sits me on the bed. We stare at the wall together. And I’m thinking how I didn’t reach my goal and that the whole strawberry/vanilla/chocolate trio isn’t nearly as good with just two flavors, and he is sitting there thinking something else, I have no idea what, and he isn’t touching me but I can hear him breathing. In the other room, people are leaving. The hidden coats scared them and they took it as some kind of cue that the party was over. Everyone is trickling out and thanking the host and whispering about me and she continues to be ultra-sincere, even when some complainer says something about a wrinkle in her coat, in a mad voice. Oops, I think. Sorry. I stare at the wall directly ahead. There’s a painting of a desert hung up. It’s in a simple wood frame and in it there’s just a row of cacti and then the sun setting in the distance and who needs weapons when they’re cacti. That’s all I’m looking at when Adam takes my hand.

The Meeting

The woman he met. He met a woman. This woman was the woman he met. She was not the woman he expected to meet or planned to meet or had carved into his head in full dress with a particular nose and eyes and lips and a very particular brain. No, this was a different woman, the one he met. When he met her he could hardly stand her because she did not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigorously and extensively to meet. And the non-fit was uncomfortable and made his brain hurt. Go away, woman, he said, and the woman laughed, which helped for a second. He trailed the woman for a few days saying it was because he had nothing else to do, but in truth he did have plenty to do and he did not know why he was trailing her. His brain made a lot of shouts and static about his brain’s own idea of hair color and sense of humor and what animals the woman he met would like (mammals) and his brain’s own idea of how to be a member of the world, and everything that was sort of like him and yet different enough and still: this woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.

His brain was in an utter panic at changing. His brain was very pleased with its current shape and did not want to shift, not one bit. This woman liked reptiles and fish. What sort of decent human being could possibly like reptiles and fish?

He said, Go away, woman. You go away, she said, shooing him with her hand. You’re the one following me around all the time.

They went on a walk-or rather she went on a walk and he asked if he could join her-together over the small bridge which ran over a dry stream and looked down at rocks which jutted up like teeth. She talked significantly more than he expected the woman he met to talk and so while she was talking he thought she is surely, and clearly, not the woman for me. Blabbermouth, he thought. She paused at an oak tree and said, Did you stop listening? and so he started listening again and said some stuff himself, about this, about that. He liked talking to her. The woman said she did not know why she liked him, as he was being something of an irritation with all this static in his head and he said he was sorry, he liked her too, but his brain kept rejecting her and he did not know what to do about that. The woman said, Please, would you shut your brain down for five seconds and let the world participate a bit? No, said the man, I control the world. The woman’s laughter bounced off the rocks below. The man laughed too but inside he still meant it.

The woman said goodbye and went to her cottage and made some spaghetti and the next day guess who was at her door. Good afternoon. How are you, how are you. The spaghetti was fine-tuned and she was beautiful in the filtered sunlight and they made love that afternoon with the green sunlight through her green curtains. Her body was new to him and he did not like the way her shoulders were so broad and he very much liked the slope of her hips and he was scared because he did not know how to navigate the curves they made together. Later, when he would become a ship’s captain on the waves of the water of their bodies, it turned out that those broad shoulders were the thing he would think of with the most lust and the most tenderness. Those broad shoulders would be what he would recognize in a crowd if they all had paper bags on their heads. Those broad shoulders he could spot across an ocean.

The following day, after the green-curtain day, he was back. They ate cold spaghetti out of paper cups on the stoop. He said, I just don’t know if I want to marry you. She snorted. What? He said, I’m sorry but I’m just not certain that you are my future wife. She spit some spaghetti out on the stoop in a little red clump and he thought it was gross and she was laughing again, not with, definitely at. He said, I always thought the woman I’d marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain. It all feels, well, foggy, he said. And she said, What makes you so sure I want to marry you? and he said, Oh, hmmm, and she said, Why would I consider marrying a man whose brain is so bossy? I need a man with some calm, she said. He looked at her nose, thin and long and her eyes thin and long the other direction and her hair was straight and long and shone. He had a bite of spaghetti off her fork. They sat for a while on the stoop and watched the lizards skit and scat until the mailman came by and delivered some letters-two bills and a postcard from her cousin on an island. She made faces at the bills and laughed at the postcard and scrutinized the little type in the upper left-hand corner telling her where it was and then looked at the picture on the front for longer than he had ever looked at all the postcards of his entire life.

When they made love that day it was one step closer to making sense and she brought them some wine afterward and they sat and watched the sunset through the green curtains, naked, with deep-bellied glasses of wine. The green darkened into black. He let his hand trace each of her vertebrae and she did not say, That tickles, stop, like he thought she might. She just looked out the muted curtain and her hair swished at an angle. He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.

It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.

Debbieland

Debbie wore the skirt all the girls had been wearing, but she wore it two months too late. By then the skirt had lost its magic and was just a piece of cloth with some tassels at the bottom. It resembled nothing more than a shred of curtain-something all the mothers had said at the beginning-but for a few months, the skirt had held inside its weave the very shimmer of rightness. If you wore it you were queen of them all, and both girls and boys followed you like strays. But you had to take the risk to wear it even though it was strange, and as soon as enough people caught on, well then. Done with. Back to curtain status. Debbie wore the skirt because she’d seen enough people wear it to know it was okay. She wore the scary skirt safely. For that, we despise Debbie.

We find Debbie in the lunchroom. She is trying, always, to lose weight. We are repulsed by Debbie’s cottage cheese and her small styrofoam bowl of pineapple slices. One of us has worn all her rings, in preparation for the harming of Debbie; Debbie, wearing that skirt, eating her pineapple slices by carefully cutting them with the side of her white plastic fork. Soft yellow droplets clinging to her napkin as she wipes her mouth. It is so easy to lure Debbie out. All we have to do is put out some bait, bait in the form of a beautiful magnet that everyone knows, one who sits down out of the blue like a daydream and asks for a slice of pineapple, please. She shares Debbie’s fork. She tells Debbie some casual praise. Perhaps, for the final net, she compliments Debbie on the skirt. Debbie blushes. All day long, she has been in love with her legs swishing underneath the skirt, with how the tassels tickle her ankles. In the corner, our bile multiplies. We feel it passing among us like disease.

The girl who is bait asks Debbie if she will go with her to her car as she has something she picked out for Debbie. Something Debbie might like. It’s that easy. The girl who is bait is, today, everything focused on Debbie, and Debbie cannot resist this, could never have resisted it; even when she thinks about it later, there is no twenty-twenty hindsight. It is the stopping of her heart. A dream come true. She has no interest in the boys, or if she does, it is only in how they will make her look to us. And today! The girl has something for her! Something for Debbie! At last it will be true, at last we will have seen Debbie, at last we will have noticed the way she has been improving her walk and clothing choices, and that beauty her one aunt always compliments on the Fourth of July barbecue will finally be a truth in the company at large.

We follow the bait and the fish, hooked. We follow the fate and the wish. Cooked. Silent on our toes. Walk soft, like whispers.

We don’t wait long. Naturally, there’s nothing in the car and only so long that the bait can pretend to rummage around in the backseat. After a minute, we pounce. Two of us hold Debbie down against the passenger door. Two others grab her feet so she can’t run or kick. The one with rings strikes Debbie several times-a few times hard in the stomach and one fist in the face so it will show, tomorrow. So she will have to explain. Debbie is screaming and crying. We rip the skirt off with our bare hands and her underwear is almost too much to bear, with that pattern that is the knockoff of the expensive one, and a giant maxi pad weighing down the middle. We rip the skirt into pieces, which is what all the mothers have wanted to do, because it is rags anyway, it is a rag skirt, made of rags. The one with the rings slides her hands down Debbie’s arms and the rings she bought at the street fair cut lines into Debbie’s skin, where drizzles of blood rise freely to the surface. The bait sits in her car, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. It’s a giveaway; the tenth caller gets tickets to go to New York City.

We release Debbie once she’s bleeding, and she slinks off, sobbing. Trying to pull her shirt down over the whiteness of her ass. Shoulders hunched, hair askew. She will never tell on us. She will never be the rat. She has a tiny part of her, the tiniest part, that still hopes this is part of some cruel initiation or test, and that if she passes it, she will still be included.

We think we could not despise Debbie more. But when we realize this, the loathing is bottomless. Possibly we could bait and hook her every day for a year, preying on that tiny hope until all of Debbie’s clothes are in a rag pile and her face is a disaster. If it was not so boring, maybe we would.

We do not speak to our mothers. Long ago we gave up on our mothers. All of us, even though some of us don’t have mothers at all. Our mothers died, or our mothers left. Our mothers changed form into a toad. Our mothers became presidents of companies or jumped off of buildings. Our mothers gave up everything for us. One of us has a father who beats the mother. We cheer him on. We like to hold the belt in our spare time and slap it against our palm like we are in a movie, with a cigar, and a damsel in silver tinsel that is ours waits privately on the couch. We go home after the Debbie beating, thrumming from some kind of adrenaline high, and somewhere close by, Debbie checks herself in the mirror. We can sense this. We begin to be concerned she might slightly admire her bruise, so we are hoping the bruise is in an unflattering spot. Since Debbie is not particularly good-looking, the odds are high in our favor. In general, we feel terrific about it all, maybe we even call each other up on the phone to talk, but generally the phone is for people like Debbie. We have better things to do. We realize life is not just a dress rehearsal and if you realize it, you don’t need a bumper sticker to remind you. We take off our rings one by one and in the sink we wash them clear of any blood left from Debbie’s arm. Her arm hairs were a little too black, frankly. We remember this as we stay up late, watching wrestling on TV because it’s so funny. We don’t mind being tired in the morning; often, we prefer it.

• • •

Many years later, we make a mistake. We make a grand error. It begins with the girl who comes to ask for directions on our college campus because we look like we always know where we are. In our features, we resemble, somehow, a compass on a neck. We see the girl approach us, with that walk of hers, very quick-paced, and her eyebrows seem funny. We have to look twice. Her eyebrows are straight and black and fierce but underneath the arch we see a garden of tiny weak brown hairs growing out from under the black. She is, apparently, in between eyebrow maintenance. She is one of those girls. We, ourselves, have never once given a shit about our eyebrows, which are fine and prosperous on their own. Still, she asks nicely, so we give her directions, and then we follow her, because there’s nothing else to do today and our classes are over. At her location we find we are waiting outside. Strangers float past, in particular that embarrassing person with her cell phone talking so loud. If our cronies were here, we would nudge her into a dark corner, but our cronies have gone off to different settings by now and are extremely poor at writing letters.

Where did Debbie go? Who cares. As soon as Debbie was removed from her skirt, we washed her from our viewpoint. She of course will remember us forever. Such is the deal we make with memory.

After about an hour or so, the one with the eyebrows exits her building, which seems like it might hold within it doctor’s appointments. We follow her. Eventually, she looks behind her. We ask her her name. She recognizes us and makes a witty comment. Because it is college, we seem less like a stalker than we will later in life. We are not sure what is going to happen as we are only one today, and therefore less certain, but there is something in those eyebrows that makes us take her hand unexpectedly near the lower parking lot. We end up kissing her by the fountain that is straight shoots of timed water. She is not as surprised as we might expect. She seems to be used to this. We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.

It lasts almost a year. It is our longest relationship. She has nightmares all the time, and huddles into our armpit in the darkness, but during the daytime she walks like she’s a cartoon hero. We actually catch some of her tears in a vial and hold it in our pocket and finger it when she’s at events working the crowd with all her teeth doing all that business. We grip the vial of tears knowing that at any moment we could expose her and the crowd might turn and tear her to pieces. We want to take care of her every minute. We want to make sure her eyebrows are safe; every time she shows up with those weak brown hairs growing in like poor weeds, like murmurs from a third world country, we are filled with a desire to strangle her while we whisper her name for the rest of our lives. We are worried all the time because she seems like the type to walk into danger without realizing it; after all, she let us kiss her by the fountain in broad daylight. She, however, is not worried about herself, or about us. We are very rarely the receptacles of worry, what with that compass we hold upon our neck.

On month eleven, she leaves us. She finds the tear vial creepy, and she’s annoyed with the constant worrying and questionings. After waxing her eyebrows until they are invincible, she goes somewhere else, to ask someone new for directions. She has taken on a new map; us, we have lost our sense of order. We find ourselves heading over to sit by the same wall where we met her. We go there every day. We go there too often. We cannot stop going. We end up Debbie.

Many years later from that, we meet Debbie again. It is not at the reunion because we don’t attend reunions. We have lost touch with one another anyway, and why else would we go? The rest of the people in high school were an uninteresting blur. We do not know who Debbie is, but she knows who we are, as we sit outside at Bob’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard pulling change from deep inside our pockets. She has a couple of kids that she is lugging along, and she stops to say hello. Remember? she says. You used to beat me up?

We squint. She is not recognizable; this woman is a middle-aged woman, with her hair cut short for practicality. Do I know you?

She describes the whole incident, and when she mentions the skirt it clicks into place. Oh, we say. Yes. Oh, we are sorry, we say, because at this age it is appropriate to say, even though we do not know if we are sorry. We do not know if we would do it again, if we had the chance, if we were surrounded by our friends and hula-hooping with pineapple rings.

She sits down. The baby on her lap is blue-eyed and has light hairs on its arms, unlike Debbie, with that black hair we still dislike intensely. The older child, also a girl, lolls behind her, looking at the stand-up menu. She is wearing expensive clothes and something about her mouth is very ungrateful.

Why did you do that? Debbie asks simply.

The waiter comes and retrieves our change, annoyed by all the linty pennies. Anything else? he asks dryly. The baby burbles.

We stare at Debbie’s baby, who looks like it is from another person’s body. Boy? we ask. Girl, she says.

It’s Debbie, right? we ask.

No, she says, wincing. My name is Anne.

Oh.

We can’t think why we have always been sure she is Debbie. Did she change her name?

I don’t know, we say. I don’t know why we did it. Sorry? we say again.

She shifts the baby like a sack of flour.

Everyone I tell the story to says you must have been feeling pretty awful about yourself to do such a thing, she says to us, gripping the top of our chair with her hand.

We listen and nod. We realize now that it has been a good story to tell people. She must get a lot of sympathy, and she has always enjoyed sympathy. Suddenly we feel she must owe us a thank-you for giving what would be an otherwise fairly dull life a little bit of texture. She stands and holds the baby close, and the baby starts to cry.

It was a good time, we say. We do not mean it in the shocking way. We just mean it was a good time, then, high school. We appreciated that time.

Debbie leaves. She doesn’t say goodbye. She has more fodder for her insulted self; she has a new way to tell her old story. We give up our table which is being eyed by new customers. Cars toil at the stoplight. We glimpsed sympathy for Debbie, yes, when we stood at the wall after our lover left us. We found ourselves hungry and desperate in the pit of the stomach, revolting to ourselves. Then we got over it. We don’t go by that wall anymore. Sure, we think of our old gal sometimes but unlike Debbie, we know what should be kept to ourselves, not available for public consumption. Sure, we still keep the tear vial in our car, even though we understand how it could be perceived as creepy. Most of it has evaporated anyway. If we ever happen to see her again, though, we like to think we could prove to her that she cried in our arms, just in case she is pretending to have forgotten. We hear, through college acquaintances, that she married some man. Of course. She always was predictable. We hear she is possibly pregnant. All we know is that her nightmares were intense and we were very comforting then, and we said smart things, and when she was crying in the middle of the night we were paramount, and that sort of connection does not evaporate. We own her, we think, as we walk west down Wilshire, toward the tar. The sky is an easy breezy blue. Perhaps, in a way, we own Debbie too. Perhaps, in a way, if anyone cries on us, we then own them, a piece of them, forever. Perhaps the vial is redundant. It seems nice, to think this. We begin the long walk home feeling refreshed. We look for who we can see crying, because after all, crying is not an endangered action. There are endless tears to hunt down and possess. To provoke or extract or soothe. We are delighted with this new world, this world full of possibility.