Willful Creatures Part 3

"It's there," she said. "Be extremely careful."

I spoke slowly, coated now in a very mild sh.e.l.lac of panic. "How," I said, "how can it be there, it would dissipate. I took chemistry. It can't just sit there. Argon," I said, "can't just sit there."

"I put guidelines in the air," she said.

"I make a formation in the air."

I turned toward the entrance.

"I think it's time for me to go," I said.

"NEON," she said, "is on shelf number three."

But right before I walked to the door, I reached out a hand which was so hard and gluey from the mango juice, reached out just to wipe it slightly on the very tip of the shelf. The coil in my stomach took my fingers there. I barely even noticed what I was doing.

The woman drew in her breath in agony.

"Aaghh!" she choked as I got in my little wipe wipe. "You broke it!"

"I broke what?" I said. "Broke what?"

"You broke AIR," she said. "You need to pay for it, you broke it, you broke AIR."

Then she pointed to a sign I hadn't seen before, tucked half behind a shelf, a half-hidden laminated sign that said: VISITORS MUST PAY FOR BROKEN MERCHANDISE.

"There's air there still," I said, "that's no special air."

"It was air in the shape of AIR," she said. "It took me a while to train that s.p.a.ce, it was AIR. That's three hundred dollars."

"What?" I said. "I won't pay that," I said, speaking louder. "I didn't even break it, look, there's tons of air around, there's air everywhere."

I waved my hand in the s.p.a.ce, indicating air, and she let out another, louder, shriek.

"That was HOPE," she said, "you just broke HOPE!"

"HOPE?" I said, and now I went straight to the gla.s.s door, "Broke hope? Hope is not a gas, you can't form hope!"

The door, thank G.o.d, was unlocked, and I swung it open and stalked into the liquid room. The woman was right on my heels.

"I caught hope," she said. "I made it into a gas."

"I want to go now," I said. "There's no possible way to catch hope, please."

My voice was gaining height. I didn't believe her but still. Of all things to wreck.

"Well," she said. "I went to wedding after wedding after wedding in Las Vegas. And I capped the bottle each time right when they said 'I do.'"

This made me laugh for a second but then I had to stop because I thought I might choke. I could just see those couples now, perched at opposite ends of a living-room couch, book-ending the air between them, the thickest, most formed air around, that uncrossable, unbreakable, impossible air, finally signing the papers that would send them to different addresses.

I thought of the seven years I'd spent with Steve, and how at first when we'd kissed his lips had been a boat made of roses and how now they were a freight train of lead.

So that I wouldn't cry, I put my hand near my face and made a pus.h.i.+ng motion, moved some wind toward her. "I'm Queen of Hope," I said. "Here. Have some of mine."

She grabbed BLOOD from the liquid room shelves.

"Give me my money for AIR!" she said, waving the BLOOD in my face.

I opened the door to the solid room and ran through it. I kept my back arched so she wouldn't touch me. I couldn't pay the money and I wouldn't pay it, it was air, for G.o.d's sake, but I didn't want that blood on me, didn't want that blood anywhere close to me.

"I'm sorry," I yelled as I edged out the front, "sorry!"

I looked past the fruit to locate my car and as I did, my eye grazed over the solid words, familiar now, but on the bottom shelf I suddenly saw CAT and DOG in big brown capitals which I hadn't seen before and my stomach balked. The woman kept yelling "You Owe Me Money!" and I hit the dead warmth of the outside air.

Everything was still. My car sat across the street, waiting for me, placid.

The woman was right behind me, yelling, "You owe me three hundred dollars!" and I took NUT out of my bag and threw it behind me where it broke on the street into a million shavings. "Nut!" I yelled. I got into my car, key shaking.

"Vandal!" she yelled back, and she didn't even try to cross the street but just stood at the front of the blue-awninged store with BLOOD in her arms and then she reached back and pelted my car with a tangelo and a pineapple and one huge hard cantaloupe. I locked my doors and right when I put my key into the ignition, she took BLOOD and threw that too; it hit the car square on the pa.s.senger-side window, cracking on the top and opening up like an egg, dripping red down the window until the letters ran clear. Maybe it was just juice, but that one I trusted, that one seemed real to me.

Hands trembling, I put my foot on the accelerator and the car started quickly, warmed from the sunlight, the desert spreading out hot and fruitless. The window to my right was streaking with red now. I kept a hand on the car lock, making sure it was down. Across the street, the woman pulled back her arm, which was an awfully good arm, by the way, she was some kind of baseball superstar, and she let fly a few guavas, which splatted blue against my rear window.

I drove away fast as I could. The shack and the woman, still throwing, grew small in my rearview mirror. I drove and drove for eighty miles without pausing, just getting away, just speeding away as the blood dried on the window, away from the piles of tangerines, from the star fruit clumped in stolen constellations, from the seven different mutations of apple.

In an hour I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a gas station. I still had the brown bag of mangoes with me. When I opened it up, they were all black and rotten, with flies crawling over them. I dumped the whole bag. The one I'd eaten was just a pit, which I removed from my purse and kept on the pa.s.senger seat, but by the time I got home and pulled into the empty driveway, it too had rotted away into a soft, weak ball.

Two teenagers were standing on a street corner.

They were both wearing the hot new pants and both had great new b.u.t.ts, discovered on their bodies, a gift from the G.o.d of time, boom, a b.u.t.t. s.h.i.+ny and nice.

They did not like their b.u.t.ts.

One was complaining to the other that she thought her b.u.t.t was more heart than bubble and that she wanted bubble and her friend said she thought heart was the best and they stood there on the street corner pressing the little silver nub that changed the mean red hand to the friendly walking man and the light did not change.

One friend had b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the other was waiting.

When the light changed, they both walked to the poster store where the cute boy worked. He was growing so fast that he slept fourteen hours a day and when he came to work he had a stooped look like he'd been lifting large objects for hours and in fact there was some truth in that, he'd been unfurling his body up through his spine, up through itself. Each day people looked shorter and today these two girls-the one he liked with the ponytail bobbing, the other one that touched his elbow which he liked too-they were there again looking in the gla.s.s case at the skull rings and joking.

The boy showed them a new poster of a rock-and-roll star in a ripped s.h.i.+rt on a stage with a big wide open mouth that you could fall into. The girls, at the same time, said they thought it was gross. Jinx! They laughed endlessly. Too much tonsil, said one, and she grunted in such a way that made them laugh for another ten minutes. It was that fifteen-year-old laugh that is like a stream of bubbles but makes everyone else feel stupid and left out. Which is part of its point. The boy got a break halfway through the time they were there and one girl said she wanted to look at the posters one by one, flipping those big plastic-lined poster holders, because she liked to stare at her own pace, and the other girl, ponytail, went out back with the growing boy, rapidly notching out another vertebra right as they spoke, straightening higher like a snake head rising from an egg. They went out back so he could smoke a cigarette and she smoked it with him and when touchy girl finished flipping through the leather-pants women and the leather-pants men and looked for her friend, she couldn't find her and wandered out of the store by herself.

Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.

She liked to kiss in public, so that if someone had a movie camera she could show people. See.

The other girl, now called Cathy, was on the street alone, looking for her friend who was out back with ash on her lips pus.h.i.+ng lips against ash, using her tongue in all the different interesting ways she could think of, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rising.

Cathy, teenager, out on the street alone.

This is so rare. This moment is rare. This teenage girl out on the shopping street alone: rare. She walked by herself, eyes swooping side to side, looking for the bobbing blur of her friend, Tina's, ponytail, but Tina was not to be seen, not even in the dressing room of the cute clothes store next door where they'd recently tried on skirts made of almost plastic that were so short they reminded you of wristbands.

Tina now had his hands on her waist, thinking of that exact skirt right as Cathy walked by it, thinking how it had held in her b.u.t.t and if she was wearing that plastic skirt now, and he held her b.u.t.t, it would remind him of a bubble, not a heart.

I do not want guys to feel my b.u.t.t and think of hearts, she said to herself, that is too weird.

Cathy walked to the corner. She thought, Did Tina leave? She thought she'd head back to the poster store but she sat down on a bench instead and when the bus came she got on. She looked at the people on the bus and no one was looking at her except some creepy old man at the front with those weird deep cuffs on his pants and the seat was cold and Tina was somewhere left out in the stores and would they miss each other? Did she miss Tina? Oh, she thought, probably not. And this was her stop and she got off and walked home, and it was hours too early, they were supposed to be at a movie, and when she went inside her mother was sitting there on the couch looking at the backyard. It was like the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short. She sat with her mom, making sure the backyard stayed put, which it did, and when her mom fell asleep it all seemed disgusting and this was what happened in the afternoon and she went and looked at herself in the mirror for an hour and felt terrible even though she liked the pose of her left profile best.

And Tina, done with kissing, done with skull rings-the boy settled back behind the counter after waiting two minutes, counting, to tame his erection-Tina was walking the streets and asking people if they'd seen a girl with a great yellow s.h.i.+rt on. No one had, they thought she meant some older woman but Tina said, No no, and she started to cry on the street because she thought the worst thing, but when she called on the phone just to see, just in case, the most familiar numbers in the world, Cathy answered. h.e.l.lo? Tina forgot how to talk for a second, she was so surprised, and then she just said, Oh. Oh? Hi. Cathy? Tina? Hi? The two girls b.u.mped around the conversation for a few minutes, but for the first time in life, they didn't know what to say to each other. After a while they just said goodbye and hung up. From then on at school they tended to be friendly but distant and found other people to sit with at lunch. By graduation day, three years later, they had forgotten each other's phone numbers completely, even though they hugged in their caps and gowns and ta.s.sels for old times' sake and said, Good luck, Keep in touch, Have a hot summer, Later.

Here is my opinion of the emergency room: it's bad.

Here's the deal: everyone is sick and coughing or has some finger falling off or is bleeding all over several Kleenexes or crying because the one they love is taken away to be fixed or not fixed or else running to the bathroom with a bladder infection. I do not think it is a good TV show. I think it is a bad place to be and I go there all too much because I am in love with someone who is in love with hurting herself so the emergency room is our second home.

The nurse knows my name. Sometimes I use a fake name just for fun but she raises her eyebrows and corrects me.

Okay, this seems unrelated but it's not: at Thanksgiving I broke a plate and my mom did not get angry. It was an especially big plate, and after I broke mine there was only one left. "These," she said to me, "have never fit inside the dishwasher anyway and they always break and sprinkle plate dust everywhere." She looked at me. "So," she said, "let's break this last one too."

We went outside and she held it up and then just let it drop. I kind of wanted her to throw it but she had her own style and that's okay. It still broke off into little plate pieces that I offered to clean up and while she went back to the turkey I swept up the pieces and thought about my mother who was not afraid.

But my girlfriend is. Afraid. Of. Name it. I am going to refuse to go to the emergency room after a while but I know I'm lying when I say that. Some things you know you will never stop, your whole life. Some things just stay and stay.

So let me tell you more facts then.

In the emergency room the carpet is yellow and filled with little drops of red (now brown) that you know have been there for years and the carpet cleaning bill should be huge but they just let it go. There will always be more blood, they figure, so why clean up the old stuff? Smarter emergency rooms use linoleum. But my girlfriend isn't a bleeder; she takes pills. I rush her in with her slurry speech and shaking limbs and sometimes I want to take her out of the car and just leave her at the emergency room gutter. I figure they'll find her, but what if they didn't? I saw a dog washed up on the beach the other day and no one saved it. Cute as it was, it was not cute enough. I thought about lifting up the collar and memorizing the number and calling the owner but I couldn't touch its wrinkly neck. I'm not as brave as my mother. She's the one who broke the plate.

My friends tell me I'm an idiot; well, I say, no. They say she'll never die and I'll do this forever and I think they're right but I still can't stop driving that familiar ride to the hospital with the weird three-way stop that takes too long. I tell my friends that I like that emergency room nurse. That it's all a big scam to f.u.c.k the emergency room nurse. With her white shoes and bouncy t.i.ts and thin knee-highs and my tongue up her dress.

You know the truth: the nurse is in fact old and tired and gives me looks like I'm causing the overdoses, right. Me, the nicest person on the face of the earth. Like I'm the problem as I sit there and read the same magazines over and over. When I look for the crossword puzzles, they're filled in, and worse: they're filled in by me. And I can't even correct myself because I still don't know the same answers I didn't know last time I was here.

My girlfriend comes out from the back this time with that tag on her wrist and she crawls in my lap and kisses my neck and I grumble to the air.

She's telling me a secret.

We all know what it is.

"Never again," she whispers to me. She thinks I'm so dumb. Like it would even matter. "This is the last and final time."

On the way out the door she wants a candy bar but has no money so we go into the lobby shop and I get her a Snickers and I get myself a coffee and we walk arm in arm to the car. At the car door I find I don't have my keys.

"Wait." I keep checking my pockets, one two in the back, one two in the front, top of s.h.i.+rt. No jingling.

"I'll go get them," she says, "they must've fallen out while you were sitting."

She's so helpful now. Her skin is very pale; she looks diluted. I sip my coffee.

"I'll look," I say, "you stay here."

I race back and the nurse's eyes widen or at least I think they do and my keys are sandwiched in the pages of a magazine causing a pregnant lump and I'm back at the car and Janie is gone. Am I really surprised? She does this all the time. And like usual, there's a little note in my winds.h.i.+eld: Took A Walk. See You At Home. Plus a little heart shape. J.

I'm supposed to be mad again. Instead I am interested in the traffic laws. Car on the right: go. Yellow means slow down. Use your blinker.

I use my blinker. I find myself using it to go into the left left lane and getting on the freeway. This is not where I live. But I love those green signs. I love that they picked green instead of black.

I drive to my friend Alan's house. He answers the door in a towel. I think he's been having s.e.x with his new girlfriend, Frieda from Germany, who he says is the hottest ever. She is walking around the living room naked and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are different, un-American. Oblong. She waves at me. I wonder, Why did he answer the door?

"Just stopped by to say hi," I say. "I was going to bring you that book but I forgot."

"Lunch?" he says.

"Sure." I go into the kitchen and Frieda spoons cereal into a bowl without milk and then leaves again. I can hear her crunching in the living room. Alan gives me a cold barbecued rib and some pear slices and a piece of paper towel and a gla.s.s of milk.

"Wow," I say. "It's the perfect lunch."

He leans closer to me. The only reason he let me in is because he wants to talk about her.

"It's so good," he says, rolling his eyes, gripping the table, "I mean: f.u.c.k. I mean: go to f.u.c.king Germany now and get yourself a girlfriend."

I'm gnawing on the rib and loving how it sticks in my teeth.

"Maybe it's not Germany," I say. "Maybe it's just her."

He nods and grips the table harder. "Then," he says, grinning, "you are f.u.c.king out of luck."

The skin of the pear is abrasive and rubs the rib juice off my lips.

"Janie?"

"Still alive," I say, "just got back."

"Pills?" He looks away.

"Yup," I say, "same darn pills."

"And you?" He leans back now. He is a decent guy.

"No pills for me."

"No, I mean how are you holding up." He takes a sip of my milk; it's a big sip and it sort of makes me twitch because I was saving it for last. Even though it is rightfully his. Still. I like milk.

"Like I said: no pills." I drink the milk until only one very slow drop is climbing up the side of the gla.s.s. I consider how I will back out of his tricky driveway. Make a perfect S shape, with one arm across the back of the front seat, like the seat is my girlfriend. A careful release on the brake while he goes to Frieda and kneels between her legs and the crunching gets louder and louder.

Back home, Janie is in front of the television. It's not on, but she's looking at her reflection in the greenish gla.s.s. She doesn't ask me where I was. She's not too good at noticing things like that, like the fact that it took me an hour and a half to get home.

I go into the bathroom and get dental floss. There are rib twigs between all my teeth. How I love to pop them out. One goes flying into the carpet.

"Do you hate me?" she asks. She has her legs tucked underneath her and her head against a pillow and I can see the line of her thigh all the way up. I still think she is beautiful. She won a beauty contest when she was six.

"Nope." I keep flossing.

"Come here," she says, and I go lie down next to her and keep flossing.