Numb

by Sean Ferrell

  At Michael’s office I led Hiko to a sofa in the waiting room. She sat facing a coffee table covered in magazines. I kissed her on the cheek and told her I’d be right back. She refused to let go of my hand.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little silly, signing your life away? You’re going to be at their beck and call.”

  “Right now I don’t have any control or money. If I sign this, I get money. One out of two.”

  “You don’t need it that bad.”

  “Who paid for the cab ride over here?”

  She let go of my hand.

  Hiko stayed in the waiting area while I went with Michael to discuss the contract. Michael started the meeting by showing me proofs of the photos with Emilia. With Hiko no longer at my side I fell back into a meditation on what Emilia offered. The photos were beautiful: a spectacular shine glinted off the nailheads in the bat and my black eyes, and the hastily done stitches nearly bled in each frame.

  Michael smiled across the table at me. “You did good. They loved you. They can’t wait for the issue to come out.”

  I kept looking at the way Emilia’s skin melted from the leather outfit and lion’s mane. Michael watched my eyes and said, “She had a good time too.”

  From that point I became too distracted to follow Michael’s description of what the movie production company wanted from me. They promised a steady income and some sort of percentage for the rights to my story, whatever it might be, whatever that might mean. Emilia’s arched back kept interrupting my focus. All I really got out of our meeting were a couple of repeated words such as standard clause and indemnity. Michael stood near his large window with a copy of the contract and, when he flipped to a new page, I did the same, pretending to follow along. Behind him, across the square rose a building under construction. A giant crane stabbed up into the air, and from it tons of metal hung quietly, suspended by cables, waiting to be turned into something.

  After seven pages of the contract I said, “Let’s just get to the heart of it. If I sign, I get some money, right?”

  Michael raised his eyebrows at me and said yes.

  “And the production company gets the rights to my life story, whatever it may be.”

  Again Michael said yes.

  “And you think this is a fair deal?”

  He said he did.

  “Where do I sign?”

  When I found my way back to Hiko in the waiting room, I discovered her reading a Vogue magazine with Emilia on the cover. She kept her head lowered as if concentrating, cocked to one side. She had her sunglasses on.

  Everything in our cupboards was labeled with stickers with bumps, even shelf edges. We spent Sundays shopping and Mondays we labeled everything so she could read them. Cans were bumped with tomato soup, chicken noodle, broth. But here she sat, reading a magazine. What if she wasn’t really blind at all? Would it make her something else?

  What would that make her?

  I walked toward her and as I got closer I saw that she had the magazine open with a Braille book inside it. I said, “What are you doing?”

  She just barely jumped, but I could see the fear behind the placid face. She looked away from the book. Her fingers played along the center of a page, soaked up the information. “I didn’t want to be disturbed, so I pretended I can see. No one asks about Braille when they can’t see it.”

  “Okay. But there’s no one else here.”

  She blushed. “With this thick carpet in here it’s hard for me to know when someone is nearby or not.”

  I put the magazine back on the table for her and took her arm as she stood. When we got to the door, she said, “What’s strange is, the book I was reading seemed to be missing some pages.”

  The next day I left early and stayed out all day. Not knowing what else to do, I went into Manhattan and found a cinemaplex with over ten theaters. I bought a ticket for the next show to start and spent the day wandering from theater to theater. I dragged a giant tub of popcorn and large soda around. I saw parts of the four movies on my floor, none of them very good, and I hardly understood much of any of them. At times I forgot which theater I was in and waited for characters from a different movie to wander into a scene. At moments Michael’s research even leaked in and I wondered if that might be the actor who disappeared, or if the story was based on one of the fakirs or accident victims. I started to feel as if all the movies were as connected to me as the research had been, as if somehow I would walk onto the screen and I would both sit in an uncomfortable seat with my feet stuck to a gummy floor and watch myself stack bags against a coming flood, prepare to battle robots from the future, fall in love with the older female teacher across the hall, vanquish demons using ancient powers locked in the heart of a chiseled rock. None of these stories was mine. They might as well have been.

  When all the salt and sugar finally had their way with me I left to get real food. I ate half a sandwich in a coffee shop and then browsed through stores near the movie theater. I wandered aisles of CDs, DVDs, and books. Displays at the ends of aisles promised me the greatest entertainment of my life until I reached other displays promising even more.

  Michael had given me a thousand-dollar loan from his office petty cash. I started to fill my arms with DVDs and CDs. I avoided books since Hiko already had so many. Hiko’s, Braille or not, were enough, and I might read some of them one day. I didn’t know how to read Braille but figured that if I ever wanted to badly enough, Hiko could teach me.

  With such a wide assortment to choose from I lost track of where I was in the store. The sections all looked the same, bled into one another, overlapped. Occasionally I’d see a name that would pop out at me and I’d recognize it, having heard it from the Brailled-over television in Hiko’s living room, or seen it along the side of a city bus, on a billboard, squeezed into place around the headlines of People, Us, and other less reputable publications. Album covers like artifacts, hieroglyphs depicting the hunt for power and prestige and pagan rights; a young girl dressed like an oversexed woman, a group of young men on a cover sticky with bright pink classic stickers from an album completed before one or more members overdosed, were committed, or died. I scooped them up. I tried to buy a sense of familiarity. I had nothing at Hiko’s of my own. I bought mine.

  By the end of the week I was sweating constantly, worried Emilia would or would not call. She’d said she would be in LA for a week and would call when she returned. That week passed. I spent the last two days taking showers and finding reasons not to go out so that I would be there if the phone rang. I stalked around the apartment, carrying the cordless phone while berating myself for not charging it and trying to keep Hiko from thinking I was hiding something as I hid and took the phone with me. I listened to DVDs on my Braille-vision television. I now had a credit card, thanks to Michael, and had wasted no time going to the nearest electronics store and getting everything that my papered-over set needed to be a complete entertainment system. The surround sound drove Hiko out of the room.

  “How can you listen to it that loud?”

  “It’s the only way to get the full experience.” I lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling as conversations and sound effects swirled around us. Hiko withdrew into her studio, leaving me with a kiss on my sweaty upper lip.

  I began to suffer from headaches that wouldn’t end. My stomach tightened but I refused to eat. I was too nervous.

  After not eating for a day and a half, hunger finally overrode my concerns about Emilia’s call. I’d avoided any contact with Hiko for nearly twenty hours straight and I’d gained some calm. I was famished and, with the phone tucked under my arm, headed into the kitchen to scavenge. I worked on half a chicken that I found in the back of the fridge. Hiko found me kneeling before the fridge with grease and herbs smeared across both cheeks, refrigerator door standing open, bones sprinkled like runes. I grunted as I tore the meat off a thigh. Half-eaten chicken lay on the floor at my knees, along with the foil it had been wrapped in.

  Hiko bumped in
to me as she felt her way to the kitchen sink. “What are you doing down there?” She washed her hands and dried them with a paper towel.

  “Eating chicken.”

  “Isn’t that old?”

  “Yeah, but it’s good.”

  “Enjoy.” She said something about being out of hand soap in the bathroom and shuffled past me.

  I had noticed our life together had run low on a lot of little pieces. Hand soap in the bathroom. Ingredients in the kitchen. Places to put my things. I built a fort out of my large CD and DVD collection. I left stacks of disks in and around the living room. The arms of the sofa were covered with DVDs I’d bought with the advance Michael had gotten me from the production company.

  I dumped the chicken carcass into the garbage and headed to the bathroom to brush chicken from my teeth and to dry my hair, still wet from my last shower. With all the showers and sweat over the last two days, it had hardly been dry. Hiko was right, there was no hand soap, and in an act of rebellion I wiped my chicken-coated hands and mouth on the hand towel. I held the phone tightly in my left hand as I angled the hair dryer around my head with my right.

  That was when the first swell of nausea rose in me. A second and third wave crashed between my navel and rib cage quickly and, as I watched myself in the mirror, my skin lightened from its normal tone to ash and then green. My eyes looked darker than usual. I felt myself sway with the next curl of my stomach and realized in the moment that I clicked off the dryer that the chicken had been older than it had been tasty. And then the phone rang. Not the cordless I held in my hand, but the hall phone. I had intended to answer the second it rang, so Hiko wouldn’t get to the hall phone in time, but now I knew that the battery in the cordless had long been dead. For two days I’d carried around the equivalent of a child’s toy. I might as well have carried around the chicken carcass.

  I swayed toward the bathroom door, prepared to lurch down the hall and yank the phone from the wall, but then my lunch made its return as a wet and chunky burp, and I turned to the toilet instead. Hands on the bowl, feet planted firmly by the tub, I heaved into an inverted V. I screamed my too-old half chicken into the toilet, light meat, dark meat, crispy skin, fatty yellow globules that I didn’t remember going down. I had borrowed this meal for such a short time. I thought, This is what a mama bird tastes, feeding her young. Then I screamed some more out, eyes clenched shut, tears streaming up my forehead, acidic burn creeping down the back of my nose. I finally dropped to my knees and cowered before the toilet. I spit and blew chicken from my nose, then rose, not bothering to flush, and guided myself with one hand on the wall, out the door to the hall where I could see Hiko on the phone, smiling and laughing.

  “Yes,” she said. “That will be nice.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “He sounds like he feels better. I think it was something he ate.” She laughed some more. “Okay. Goodbye.” She hung up the phone and said, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Vomit dripped off my chin. “Who was that?”

  “That was the model you worked with. Emilia. She is very funny. We are meeting her for coffee tomorrow. Unless you don’t feel good.”

  I dropped my phone.

  WE MET EMILIA in a coffee shop near Union Square. On the way I quizzed Hiko over and over about what the conversation had entailed, why she had agreed to meet this woman.

  “She said she enjoyed working with you and that she doesn’t have many friends in New York.” The way Hiko defended this as charity for Emilia let me know it was charity for me. She thought I had too few friends, that I was lonely, that I needed to get out, find something to be other than a pincushion. I couldn’t argue, not without revealing that I knew what she thought and that Emilia had lied, that Emilia flaunted my deceitful interest in her, that it was a test of me and my commitment and intentions, that I was failing.

  When we entered we found her near the cafe counter, stunning in a black turtleneck, leather jacket, and short red skirt. I held Hiko’s arm at the elbow, steered her across the room, past empty tables. As Hiko and I approached, Emilia waved and winked at me with a large grin. Breathing became difficult as Emilia introduced herself to Hiko. “It was so nice talking to you yesterday.” She guided Hiko to a nearby table.

  Emilia, Hiko, and I sat down, the table so small all three of us were pressed together shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. Our knees bumped under the table. I could feel Emilia’s bare skin as she made room for me to slide in.

  “You must be very beautiful to be a working model,” Hiko said. “The photos of you and Numb must be striking.”

  “They do a lot of touch-ups.” Emilia winked at me as she said this. “Lots of makeup, special lights, lenses.”

  “Don’t be modest,” Hiko said.

  “She is very pretty,” I said. Emilia was. Especially now, in the low light of the coffee shop, her hair pulled back, and wearing deep red lipstick but no other makeup.

  A tingle ran up my spine when Hiko said, “May I touch your face?”

  “Of course,” Emilia said. She leaned forward, eyes on me, and as Hiko reached out Emilia took her hands and pulled them to her face. Softly Hiko touched her cheeks, her forehead, the soft dip of her chin beneath her full bottom lip.

  Something shifted on my leg. Emilia’s hand rested on my thigh. She stared at me as Hiko examined her face.

  Hiko said, “He didn’t tell me you were this beautiful. The proportions of your face are perfect.” She cupped Emilia’s chin. Beneath the table Emilia squeezed my thigh, ran her fingers toward my waist, then she reached up to my face. As Hiko pulled her hands away Emilia dug her nails into the back of my neck. There was intense pressure, then a rush of warmth that trickled down my back.

  Emilia pulled her hand away and wiped at her nails. “It’s nice to be able to get together with both of you. I don’t know many people in the city. I do so much traveling.” She spoke warmly and directly to Hiko. She turned in her seat so that I could see along her legs up toward her skirt, which she pulled back a bit. I thought I would melt when she picked up a fork from her plate and touched it, softly at first, against the soft skin of her inner thigh. I looked past Hiko to the clerk oblivious to the sideshow act about to be performed at the too-small table by the window.

  “Did he tell you about the photos?”

  Behind her glasses, Hiko blinked rapidly. She’d been asking me about them for a week. I’d refused to talk about it. She said, “Not too much, no.”

  “It’s hard to know how to describe them,” I said. My eyes were locked on the tines of the fork, at the dimpling they created in Emilia’s leg. She dragged it along for a few inches, left four red scratches in her skin. I wanted to be the fork. I also wanted to be that skin.

  “I think the photos and interview will be great for you,” Emilia said to me. “You won’t be surprised when he’s famous, will you, Hiko?”

  “Of course not. He’s a hound for the publicity anyway.” She smiled and turned her head toward me. I knew that beneath her cat’s-eye sunglasses her black eyes were like painted windows. But still, for a second I thought she saw everything. “You should have heard the way he reacted to a group of fans on the way over here,” she said. “They must have seen the film of him with the lion.”

  “Whether I want to be famous or not, I may not have a choice,” I said at last. My hand trembled as I reached out. “If the contract I signed leads to anything, I’ll just have to deal with it, be a part of whatever they cook up.”

  “Why?” Hiko asked.

  “I don’t want some idiot playing me.”

  Emilia laughed. “You should let them do whatever the hell they want. Take the money and run.”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “Of course it is. If you don’t remember any of your past anyway, why feel tied to it? Cut the cord, take their money, and don’t look back.”

  I touched Emilia’s thigh. She took my hand and guided it to the scratches left by the fork. We sat like
that for just under an hour, Hiko’s sightless eyes watching Emilia guide my fingers along the lines she’d gouged into her skin, my hand becoming warm and then hot as I felt the small ridges, raised and red and probably sore, parallel and barely separated and ruining the perfect white of her thigh. We spoke of her travel. We spoke of Hiko’s art. I thought of where else a fork might go.

  Emilia said, “I have to go soon, but maybe you could walk me back to my place?”

  Hiko smiled. “We’d love to. It’s a nice day for a walk.”

  Emilia pressed my hand against her leg and said, “Yes, and then you’ll know where I live. You can drop by anytime.”

  With my free hand I reached to the back of my neck and felt the small oozing scratch that Emilia had left there.

  I said, “So, let’s get going then.” I helped Hiko out of her seat and the three of us walked out of the coffee shop, me between the two women, guiding the blind one by the arm and tightly gripping the other’s hand.

  THE FIRST TIME I went to Emilia’s apartment alone I forced myself to think of it as a casual, friendly visit. My self-delusion lasted until I knocked on her door and she answered it in only a pair of jogging shorts.

  All she said at the door was, “Finally.”

  She took me into her living room. Overwhelming deep red walls backed the burgundy leather couch, which swallowed me as I sank into it. She grabbed my belt and said, “You’re going to show me that scar this time.”

  As she undid my belt, I looked at the light on the ceiling. When Hiko and I had walked her back here, we had parted at the street with Emilia giving both me and Hiko warm hugs and an invitation to visit. Now I lay on my back as she pulled my pants to my ankles. Her ceiling light looked like a giant eyeball. It stared right back at me and never blinked.

  She dug her nails into my thigh, raising red lines alongside the old white scar. “It’s so pretty,” she said. She kissed the scar and began to lick it. I swore her tongue had a cat’s roughness as she lapped at the scar and the red welts she’d raised. She was absorbed by it. Her hands clung to my thigh and calf; she climbed me like a tree. She pushed her mouth against my leg and my flesh twitched beneath her. I began to pet her head.