“Who do?”
“The itchies.”
I scraped my nails down the length of her spine and she shivered with gratitude.
“It’s because of the eggs,” she tried again.
“Whose eggs?”
“The aliens’.” She didn’t have the strength for impatience. “They embed their eggs, little eggs, and they itch.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Scratch a bit lower?”
I obliged and felt her body teeter. “How many fingers am I holding up?” I flattened my hand against her red-hot belly.
“I warned you. It’s contagious.” She was so near to sleep, hovering over that deep silky vacuum, that her words seemed to echo. “You’re gonna get it.”
Her last admonishment: “Take a shower.”
In this steamed-up state of peace, frail as an eyelid, we both nodded off.
* * *
IT WAS THE FIRST DEEP sleep either of us had had for a very long time. When I awoke, I found her standing over me, a hair dryer in one raised hand. It was pointed, Taser-gun style, at my temple.
“Hands up,” she growled.
Groggily, I obliged.
With motherly patience and doctoral precision, she moved the hair dryer over my body, heat turned on low. She lingered over my armpits, watching the hairs flutter, until my skin started to burn.
“What gives?” I felt unsure of myself, unanchored from routine. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d been up before me. The curtains were drawn and only an indeterminate gray light leaked in.
“Purging you,” she said simply. “Better safe than sorry. You wouldn’t believe how these bad babies burrow. They cling.”
It took me a minute to realize she was still talking about the itchies. I tried to sit up, but my arms were glass noodles. I didn’t know what time it was. She was fully dressed: black tights, black boots, a short black skirt, her bull’s-eye sweatshirt, and a suede camel jacket. She looked nothing if not sharp. Only when she walked past the window could I detect the remnants of her illness: a looseness in her gestures, a color in her cheeks approximately two shades too pale.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked. My sinuses were cotton-stuffed, and the corners of the bedroom seemed awfully far away. “I don’t feel good,” I found myself saying, when really I felt limpid, both heavy and light, as if you could fold me up and put me in your pocket or just blow me away.
“No surprise there.” In one swift motion, she clicked off the hair dryer, wound up the cord, and stuck it in a duffel bag on the carpet beside her. I blinked and the bags multiplied.
“I’m going home,” she said shortly.
I chuckled at her feverish confusion. “You are home.”
She just shook her head. I squinted and saw that she’d put on new lipstick, a deep plum called Dark Continent. For one sick moment I was certain she’d poisoned me. Then her hand was on my forehead, smoothing back my hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you you’d catch it. I’ll leave you some magnesium tablets.”
“But where are you going?” I asked, bile rising. I felt scooped out, with a million fingers I couldn’t coordinate.
“Somewhere with high ceilings.”
“What?”
“It’s not clean here,” she said, scratching her ankle with the other hand. “My skin’s not my own.” I watched in an arrested state of horror as she scratched a hole right through her tights. “What do they say in movies? I can’t breathe.”
“Oola,” I spluttered. “I’ve been nothing but nice.” My mouth felt fat and the words weren’t coming. I could see the outline of scabs through her tights.
“Poor Leif. You don’t get it.” She began to button her coat. She paused thoughtfully over the last snap. “Do you know what the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to me was?”
I racked my brain. We hadn’t done this question yet. “What?”
“It was someone I cared about a long time ago.”
I knew who it was by the tone of her voice. It was Le Roy, blasted Le Roy, the Slender Man stalking through both of our dreams.
She buttoned the last button. “He said, ‘I like you best in the abstract.’” She shouldered her duffel bag. “He wasn’t trying to be nasty. He thought I’d feel the same.”
“I’d never think that!” I cried, or tried to cry. “I like you best in the marrow—I mean in the flesh, right down to the quick! I’d rub myself in the roots of your hair. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
She smiled sadly. “Promise?”
I nodded like a lap dog and she touched my cheek. “I’m not sure that’s any better, love.”
She was hovering over me yet crossing the floor. The sound of her boots made the windowpanes shake. She coalesced in the doorway, a bag on each shoulder. She blew me a kiss. “It’s safer,” she explained, though of the contactless kiss or her future destination I couldn’t be sure. She took one step, then turned around. The hall light bloomed behind her. “Make sure to shake out the sheets,” she said, and with only minimal fanfare from the sun-swollen floorboards, she turned off the light and was gone.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL TWENTY-FOUR hours later, after scouring the property with a hot-water bottle in one hand and a can of tuna in the other, that I realized she’d taken Theo with her. The truck stood in the driveway. She must have hitched a ride, from Rocko or the college kids who came in sunscreened hordes to trip, or maybe just some lonely motorist, cruising by pure chance into our fucked-up narrative. In that moment a chill wind knocked over the abalone-shell ashtray and the loneliness leveled me. My bathrobe blew open. The redwoods witnessed my disgrace. I sat down in her bathtub, sticky with sap, and wept for twenty-four more.
Day Trip
Tragedy is not in the fact that bad things happen. It’s in the fact that things keep going, mowing in tight circles, lowing in library tones, that the next day you’ll wake up and think about the last thing that you read.
EX PORN STAR SHARES ALL
Or the last thing someone said to you, which will never be profound, or at least not in the way you would like it to be. Cash or credit? Work those glutes. Doing OK, love? Beautiful day. You’ll put on your slippers. You’ll worry about climate change. You’ll absolutely make coffee. TV always on, somewhere in the background, and underneath that, the vacuous chitchat of birds. Banality wins, even in the wake of the fantastic and terrible. One goes shopping, once the shock wears off, and reaches, as always, for the same brand of cereal. You may not eat it, you may rip the box open and sprinkle it into your bath, but in the moment of reckoning, pushing your cart, the name still speaks to you. The need for an aspirin, the fear of beestings … the ping of satisfaction when you have exact change … no disaster can save you from that, love. Despite a history of tears, the world has gone on eating ice cream.
Just as cruel is that you will forget about it. The pain doesn’t quite fade but rearranges itself. We become less articulate about what and where hurts. Whenever bad things happened, my mother and myriad others would soothe, At least the sun’s still shining! We know the moon will rise tonight. Personally speaking, I find that infuriating.
The cabin didn’t change overnight; the trees didn’t tremble, the ocean didn’t froth. No black-clad men knocked on my door. She left quickly, without much time to pack. The halls and drawers still reeked of her. I was left alone with a trail, like a big party’s detritus: the tender booby traps of my amour. I must admit that for the first couple of weeks I trod lightly, no shoes on, as if living at the scene of a crime.
Immediately after she left, I did all the normal things: I gave her a few days to cool off. I left the lights on, in case she came back at night. I kept the cabin spotless. I called up friends, steeling myself against their pity, their insincere proclamations that this shit is normal, just give her some space, man, their uncasual attempts to get the whole story—did you do something bad, Leif? I just have to ask. After a week, however, I’d run th
rough people to call. I had no idea how to contact her family. I wasn’t sure which dinky SoCal town, dreaming on the outskirts of the outskirts of L.A., was hers. All I could do was keep working, biding my time. I knew it wasn’t over. And yet my brain seemed to deflect her. She only appeared whole in my dreams, for brief flashes. In the weeks after she left, I thought a lot about my mother, and Tay, who I coolly recognized as my first love, and childhood friends. I thought about places I’d traveled to but hadn’t really liked, like Vienna. I thought about my golden retriever. I thought about house museums, seemingly dull institutions that have nothing to show and are proud of this fact. When traveling I went to a ton of them, because they were cheap, regardless of who’d lived there. George Sand’s house, Freud, Yates, Gustave Moreau, Wilhelm Reich, General Vallejo, Henry Darger, Anne Frank, Kurt Cobain; the summer homes of low-level nobles, simulacral Danish villages, rarely read poets’ sad rented rooms; Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House, which was twenty minutes away. It was only in my own home, that dim gaping cabin that might as well have been mine, that I finally understood what they’d been getting at all along. The house museum’s job is to make the emptiness feel fresh, as if the occupant has only just stepped out of frame. Ashes on the windowsill, coffee sediment in mugs. These are the things that send shivers, that hasten the ghost. She’ll be back any minute now, with cigarettes, with ice. Hold tight. The secret life of her stuff will not let her die. As in a cartoon, I communed with a teacup, still teeth-marked. So long as her turtlenecks retained their shape, I kept hope up; but it would be me, in the end, who filled them.
This was the winter of my Gothic descent. I was like a seventeenth-century eccentric (euphemistic for pansy), tending to orange trees and naming my rooms—Maroon Chamber, Plaid Library, the Withdrawing Room. The cabin slowly transformed. I got an eBay account, as all shut-ins must. I haunted flea markets in neighboring surf towns. I invited friends to stay over in these extra bedrooms, in which hopeless and obscure poetic gestures were to be inscribed: a (slightly dented) rosewood table, a bowl of candies by the bed, a telling use of damask, dammit, so that he or she might sense, in the heaviness of special bedsheets, the reverberations of my love. No one ever came. My emails were too long, I think.
Just like that of faggy lords of yore, my opulence grew in direct proportion to my loneliness. Picture a slim figure in slippers, surveying his chambers—Star Room, the Armory, Crimson (Used to be Utility) Closet—steeping his heart like a sachet of tea. He remembers aloud the names of great poets, great battles, great lovers, the Great Lakes. In this mode, a transition would be nothing but natural. That’s what I told myself. The feminine are our rememberers. Remember this. The femme body is marked, which on the one hand means cursed, singled out, and on the other, indented. Things leave marks. Bruises, hickeys, green splotches from cheap nickel bracelets. I settled in for a winter of licking my wounds, and, subsequently, became a bit of a hoarder. More lilacs, more knickknacks. More matter to feel with. I let my body billow, and the breasts came in with the next order of crabapples. They were silicone, a cyber-steal; I ordered them from China. I’d also ordered basil for the garden, a terra-cotta gargoyle, and three bolts of bone charmeuse.
I fell readily into my new role, Big Sur’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, up to no good in his house on a hill. Big Sur could handle its fair share of “characters.” I was not the only man to wear his hair in a braid, not by a long shot. What set me apart was the ribbon that bound it: found in the pocket of Oola’s raincoat, along with a half-eaten carrot. My models, besides Richard O’Brien, were the Shelleys and Ed Wood. And Oola, Oola, Oola. I also quite liked Grace Jones’s flair.
So what really happened?
I continued to write. I wasn’t worried for Oola. Lonely, perhaps, but not worried. We were far from over; of this, I was certain. And in the time until our reckoning, I had plenty to keep me busy. In a way, it was nice to not have her around—one less distraction from my work.
I continued wearing her clothes. When I ran through what she’d left behind, I ordered more off the Internet—not according to my taste but to hers. That was an important moment. I even tried to sit at the desk as she would, jigging one foot restlessly, hand over my mouth. I decorated as she would have wanted—lots of mauve. Without a subject to study, I started jotting down memories whenever they hit me. When the words wouldn’t come, I resorted to gesture. What would Oola do now? How would she open this jar? (Unfortunately for my silk drawstring pants, rather messily.) How did she hold her cigarette, her brush? On the rare nights when we’d go to parties, I used to love to watch her put on lipstick; recalling the angle of her wrist so many months later, I picked up a tube of Pulp Fiction and attempted to emulate her reflexive sweep, pop, and leer. In this way I taught myself how to handle her makeup, until, after much trial and error, I could blend perfectly. I developed a taste for hot mustard. I kept feeding her crow. I sunbathed, got tan. I didn’t have many people to talk to, but in my head I practiced her favorite expressions, editing expletives and pauses into my stream of consciousness. I kept her alive in my dreams, which were fitful, and alive in my daily routine, which was calm. I did not become somebody new. I did not become something I’d been all along. I became somebody I knew very well. My true identity was that of the spurned.
Why is it normal for straight boys in bands to grow out their hair and wear floral in an attempt to be somebody else but not so for a writer? I routinely fall in love with the singer of any show I go to. Sometimes a bassist tickles my fancy, but it’s almost always the lead man or lady who snags. I try my hardest to make eye contact, to share a moment in their moment in the sun. Once, I swear to God, the singer of a band called Considerable Discharge locked eyes with me and didn’t blink. As soon as the song ended, he gurgled, “Nuts!” and toppled over, apparently having OD’d.
On the porch in Oola’s fur-trimmed mules, I felt a similar attention shift. Forgive me if I liked the limelight, even if it was mostly of my own imagining or just coming from the trees. Pinelight, I should call it. There were the times it wasn’t pleasant, this sense of being watched. I was modest at first; when I went shopping in Salinas, I wore baggy sweaters and tinted lip balm. I braided my hair to look surfery. It wasn’t long, though, before I began to feel disingenuous; if Oola had to brave the gaze, to rein in her infamous limbs and endure the catcalling just to traverse a Starbucks to put creamer in her coffee or walk (assembled men would say saunter) from point A to B, then, in order to really succeed, I had to too.
I tried it out at a farmers’ market near Esalen. Nothing too flashy—black tights, black eyeliner, these fabulous cow-patterned clogs that I ordered online. I wore my hair down; by then, late November, it was an inch past my shoulders. As I wedged into the crowd of bare- and big-armed farmworkers, plus swirly artisans, stoned locals, and bellowing children, so many of O’s public habits clunked into place: how frequently she asked questions like Is there scuzz on my face? Does my hair look OK? Is my left ass cheek wet? but didn’t listen to my answers; in big crowds, fixing her eyes on a distant point unknown to me and striding forward as if walking a pirate’s plank; a minor tic of clicking her jaw; a vague and constant nervousness I’d associated with citizens of the former GDR. Now I felt it too.
There was no sea change but rather an undertow: a subtle suck as I passed by, and the tickle of eyes, like submerged seaweed groves, on the parts of my body not easily monitored. I could feel myself being asterisked—shoppers pausing to look, wonder, maybe exchange knowing glances. It wasn’t clear if this was because, at last, I’d become Somebody (of interest! of note!) or just Some Thing. Amid handmade soaps and fancy jams, glow-in-the-dark marmalades and twenty types of honey, I was to be sorted—or, in more violent fantasies, sorted out—later. Not all the attention was unkind, but for me, a relative virgin to head-turns, the inability to be neutral was daunting. I copied O’s poise: an expressionless bitch-face and long lunging steps, and a sunbeaming smile to the farmers who served me. “Anything else, ma’am?” as
ked a leathery nana as she double-bagged my plumcots. I could’ve kissed her. Instead, I whispered, “No, thank you,” and left a monster tip in her Mason jar.
I adapted. What else could I do? I took care of my hair. I took care of the garden; we had an avocado tree, two oranges. I lost weight on a diet of tortillas and Dijon. It was surprisingly easy to go fully vegan; the only thing I missed was butter on my bread. Oola rarely shaved her legs, and I tried only once, out of curiosity. I stared at the piano, gathering dust, and pictured myself pounding away. The word transvestite occurred to me, but it seemed circumstantial, not specific enough; to the teenager bagging my groceries with unusual speed, perhaps it made sense, but at home, in my robe, with my hair in a knot, devotee, sexpot, or wretch seemed like a much better fit. The proper term changed with my mood, although freak (uttered by a self-styled buckaroo in line at the last known Blockbuster) always stayed with me. In my opinion, far freakier than my stocking-clad legs was the fairy ring of mushrooms that had sprung up in the yard; over the weeks, I watched it grow in size, and when I began waking up with a metallic taste in my mouth, I couldn’t help but associate it with the mushrooms’ takeover. They were as sinister and cute as a boys’ choir, little white dresses in rows. I wished Theo were still around so that he could pee on them.
There were the times, of course, when living alone got me down: buying a loaf of French bread that I knew would go stale before I could finish it, or turning off the hall light without having to ask first. There was the particularly blue evening when, for want of a TV, or, more specifically, foreign voices and noise, I dug the radio out of the cupboard and tuned it to news while I ate. Thereafter, it seemed always to be playing: classical for Oola, or sometimes UC Berkeley’s student station for me, always half-volume, discreetly placed in the kitchen, the guardian angel of lone diners coast-wide. Occasionally I awoke to the NPR theme song, having nodded off on the Orangery (aka living room) couch; rarely did I ever feel more depressed. I’d have to jump up and turn it to something more lively, some samba or synth, just to get my blood flowing. I avoided my reflection for fear of how pathetic it looked. But there were also moments in late afternoon when I stood in a corridor-shaped shaft of light, showing off (to the gargoyle) my new gift from the crow, with my eye makeup just exactly as Oola had done it and smiling with the same bleary pride, holding myself as she did with her neck slightly hooked and left hip canting off to the side, and I knew, I was certain, that I’d nailed it. This was exactly as she would have felt, right down to the horseradish taste in the back of her mouth and the C shape of her spine. The redwoods raked the roof with their digits and nodded in druggish agreement.
Oola Page 20