Verge

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  I signed up to see him immediately.

  The glass between us, black phones in our hands, eyes locked on each other’s face.

  “Hello.”

  Silence.

  I was hot and excited. My breath trapped in my lungs. My words flew out in all directions, pinched and condensed through the tinny microphone. “You shocked my shit the day I saw you. What are you in for? Do Mom and Dad know? I don’t think they do. No one has said anything. What are you in for?”

  Silence.

  His eyes crept up my collarbone and rested somewhere between my jaw and my chin.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I babbled on. “How long are you—”

  “Shut up. Listen to me. I’m only going to say this once. I want you to hang up. I want you to stand up, turn around, walk out of here, and never fucking come back.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You think you’re the only reason I’m here? I’ve been here hundreds of times. It’s no big deal. I just thought I’d—”

  “SHUT UP. Shut the fuck up.” He raised his hand; his fist and its reflection hovered there like threatening question marks. “I know why you’re here. I’ve heard all about it.” He paused; his rage seemed to melt for a moment, then snapped back. “What happened to you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re famous in here. You’re, like, the talk of the fuckin’ town.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. People here know me. They’re used to me, is all. I know the name of—”

  “You don’t get it, do you? You want to know what they call you around here? Do you? They call you Hole. Just Hole.” He laughed hard enough for his missing teeth to show. “You’re like this child who spreads her legs and humps any guy who wants it. There’s pictures of you—little cartoons all over this fucking place. There’s little poems about you, about your pussy, the way you put out, how you’re a little whore.” He picked something out of his ear and looked at it, then back at me. “I heard a guy say you sucked the dick of a dead man.”

  “You’re lying. You’re a fucking liar.” I stood up. A guard glanced at me. I sat back down. I lowered my voice. “I know the scene here a lot better than you. Look. If somebody said those things, it’s a lie. People here know me. Guards. Inmates. They work with me. Give me shit. I sell it. Or I get shit for them. Like you used to do.”

  “Yeah? Well, how come every guy in here can give a play-by-play description of what you do?” He folded his hands on the table.

  Were those my brother’s hands? His fingers? I looked at my own hands down on my thighs. They just looked like the hands of a girl. “Fuck you! You don’t know me at all. I’ve got my own life. My own money. I’ve worked hard for it. I thought you’d be glad to see me. I’m all you’ve got. I’m leaving soon anyway, don’t worry. When I’m gone, no one will know you’re here.”

  “You know what happens to me when they find out you’re my sister? I’m fucking marked. I’m a dead man.”

  I tore loose from his ugly mouth and words like some scared animal. I ran from that room and his hand on that black phone and his voice and his face. I ran down the linoleum hall and past the fondling guards, smirking, laughing, touching themselves, I ran past the check-in desk and out the colossal metal doors I’d seen installed, I ran down the concrete path I’d seen poured, I ran past some men in the yard, orange suits laughing like mouths, I ran against chain-link and sky, I ran to the gate, and it was closed, and I climbed it, I clawed my way up, guards with guns drawn pulling at my heels and tears and spit and my head pounding like crazy. I growled and kicked all the way down, and they were laughing, they saw who I was, and they started laughing, and when they got me to the ground, pinned and wriggling there on the asphalt, saying, “Hold on, now, hold on, we’re just trying to help you, damn it, calm down, now,” holding my wrists and thighs, I screamed, I took all the voice in me and screamed out to that big sky, to the men holding me down, to all the men in that place I’d given myself to, to the walls, the fences, the whole architecture, I screamed, “He loved me, he did, forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up the sum!” and an ambulance came, and men standing in the yard would say later, “That crazy little piece of tail finally lost it,” and “Didn’t she have a sweet pussy, all pink and sticky like the open mouth of a child, didn’t she just?”

  A WOMAN REFUSING

  Guy busts into the diner I’m in and blares out, There’s a woman on top of the Wells Fargo tower somebody get some help! I’m scraping the inside of my coffee cup with a spoon. The circles grate; people in booths cringe and look at me. I take my time turning around. She doesn’t need any help, I say. But she’s naked! he says, flapping and squawking. And she’s forty stories up—Christ, what if she jumps? I continue my unbearable stirring. People have turned their attention to us, a little drama for lunch. I stop stirring to say, That ain’t why she’s up there, and then I start again. I don’t even look at him. I can hear his agitation as he lurches over to me, in my face, and says, How the hell do you know? He’s exasperated. Try being married to her for a few years, I think. Try living that life for one fucking day. I finally turn and look at him. I know because I’ve been up there, I tell him. Not just this time. Hundreds of times. And, buddy, I can tell you, I ain’t going up there anymore. In Cleveland it was the pump station, in Boston the tower in Harvard Square, in Lubbock the Buddy Holly statue—which is only ten fuckin’ feet off the ground. No, sir, this is it. I’m not going after her anymore. I drink the whole cup down in one gesture, like letting all the years settle into one fine, lukewarm caffeinated beverage.

  He’s not satisfied. Look, mister, he says, I don’t care if she is your wife—Ex-wife, I correct him—whatever, ex-wife, she’s in trouble, and somebody needs to help. We can’t just stand by and let—

  I snort out a laugh. What I’m trying to tell you is, I was just up there half an hour ago. Talking her down on a goddamn walkie-talkie the entire way up, with a bunch of people I don’t know trailing me. You know, strangers are full to the brim with advice until an actual fuckin’ crisis hits, and then they stand there with their goddamn mouths open like bloated, paralyzed fish.

  I get up there, again, for the I-don’t-know-how-manyeth time, and she’s naked, yet again, and cool as a fucking cucumber. First thing she says to me is, What the hell are you doing here? Couldn’t they find somebody more suitable? Christ. Just for the sake of argument, I say, since we’ve been through this before, I say, What do you mean by suitable? You want a guy in a suit? I laugh. She doesn’t. Someone more dramatic, she says, less . . . I don’t know, ordinary. I look down at the tar on the roof there. Old baseballs, wadded-up paper, wire, weird stuff up there. And I say, Dorothy, I think they assume we have a common history. She looks off and says, Well, they should have considered the ramifications of that. I say, Jeez, are things really that bad, that you have to keep pulling stuff like this for the rest of your life? Wasn’t it enough for us to go and break up? When I say “that bad,” I make the mistake of waving my arms around. She responds by waving her arms wildly and saying, As a matter of fact, things have never been better. Throws one leg over the edge in some kind of fit. That was the whole marriage—one leg over the edge.

  I bet from the ground you saw a helpless naked woman lurching and retracting.

  I then make mistake number two. I say, Well, you look great. She says, You motherfucker. She starts cursing so hard that spit flies out of her mouth and her hair rages around like crazy from a wind whipping up briefly. She says, You are the most predictable human being on the planet. You are like Tupperware. Then she makes obscene flailings with the other leg until she’s sitting on the edge. My heart is jackknifing in my lungs—old feeling. I move toward her out of instinct, take a moment of comfort in that: Anyone in their right mind would move toward a naked woman on a rooftop if she got too close to the edge. She darts a You’re dead lo
ok at me and says, Listen, don’t be such a pathetic ass. You couldn’t get me to be a wife. You can’t get me down from here. You can’t even make me put my clothes back on. You try to grab me, I’ll just divorce you in a more permanent way, know what I mean?

  All I can do is stand there staring at nothing. I’m so familiar with this feeling that I can barely recognize it: Me like a jerk with my hands dangling from the ends of my know-nothing arms. Me looking at the ground, no matter where I am in my life, no matter what successes, failures, confidence, or panic I may be feeling. We freeze there like that for a long minute, until finally she calms down a bit. A light breeze joins us. You know what’s extraordinary? she says. What? I say. You can see flight from above. Yet another completely incomprehensible statement from what always appeared to be a normal, beautiful, intelligent woman. I respond—who knows why, maybe it’s inevitable—What are you talking about? I’m tired. I don’t want to listen to her nonsense anymore. I am more tired than I have been in my entire life. We’re not even together anymore, and won’t be. I could remarry, I could have a thousand different lives in a thousand different worlds, and we’d still meet here, like this, in this way. Birds, she says. From up here you see them from the top, not the belly side. See their backs, the tops of their wings. And she holds her hands and arms out like a bird. For an instant I think, My God, she is as beautiful as ever, she is so angry and interesting that she’s larger than life, and I think, This is it, this is really it, she’s changed, she’s different somehow. If the wind blows, she’ll lose her balance, and I screech, DOROTHY, DON’T! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE DON’T—

  She says, Don’t be an ass. I’m not a bird.

  So I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to drink this coffee, and when I’m done, I’m going to walk out of here, and I’m never going to see her again. I’m still a young man. I’ve got a life, pal. You wanna save her? Knock yourself out.

  SHOOTING

  She pulls up to a stop sign like blood throb. Motherfucker. She has a flat; she can feel it like a bruised shoulder. Front left. She wheels it over to the curb. Her jaw aches. Her left eye twitches.

  Jack. Spare. Tire iron. Truncated lines stack themselves in her skull as she moves. The line Ten years. The line Suffering makes us stronger. She sets up the metal that will fix her, there on the road’s shoulder. It makes a cross. She can’t not see it as a cross. The line Recovering Catholic. This makes her laugh. She thinks, Jesus Christ, then, Goddamn it.

  First crank. The muscle in her right arm pops up, ready. The cords in her neck tighten. Her left arm dulls over; memory.

  * * *

  • • •

  YEAR ONE. Her face down near the pavement. Skin, she thinks. Up close the road looks like bumpy, black, magnified skin. She remembers sitting on the pavement, laughing hysterically until the light changed and he grabbed her by the scruff and yanked her back into the car. She still had vomit smear around her mouth, but she was laughing her ass off. Seven hundred dollars, he said. You can’t just carry your money around in your pockets like that. Look at it, he said, it nearly fell out into the street there, it’s got barf on it, for crissake. She was still laughing. She couldn’t help it.

  * * *

  • • •

  YEAR TWO. I’ll pay you two hundred fucking dollars to kiss that guy on the mouth. She waved the cash in one hand like a gray-green fan, steering with the other. Her lover and some guy they picked up on the side of the road. They’d been driving for two hours in some shit-sack place in Texas, and she was bored. Flat flat flat fuck this state, was what she always thought of Texas. Pancake flat. Hand splat on pavement flat. Where do you come up with this shit? he asked, to which she replied, Kiss that guy on the mouth with tongue. The two men looked at each other innocently. They were high, childlike. They were more beautiful than was humanly possible. She wanted it. She wanted his mouth on his mouth in her rearview. She wanted man-on-man wet like that. She pulled the car over into dirt and scrub and the lost dry heat of endless sky. She got out of the car. Her boots crunch-printed tracks on that land. She leaned against the red metal, smooth as a drive-in movie. She smoked. She waited for them. She waited for them to meet a woman with a want bigger than Texas.

  And they did it. They split her money. Then they all fixed there in the shade of the open trunk, wide open as a mouth. Her eyes went wild like fire. Then closed. Her arm lax. Her mouth open. Her desire a flooded desert. Smile float teeth vertebrae melt.

  * * *

  • • •

  YEAR THREE. They never spoke of it except to call it “the incident.” It started out around nine p.m. They had an epic fight. She slammed the door and left. She went to a bar he knew about but did not frequent much with her. The bar she haunted before she found him: club dancing and sleeping with women. She wanted something back. Or she wanted to be free to shoot around like a marble again. Or she wanted something else.

  Inside the bar the smell and the dark and the red vinyl and the sticky black linoleum floor and the regulars and the deejay and her hair, hanging behind her, she could feel it on her back, it comforted her. In a flash she’s dancing hard as a boxer with a woman who is thin and muscular and jagged-haired.

  Every time they fight, she wants to run or fix.

  She remembers the incident. She understands the unsuturable scar it left over his heart. She can see hear smell feel the flash of memory, one scene at a time: His footsteps walking up his own driveway. The windows of the car fogged up. The car seeming to move there in the driveway. What he saw next. He opened the car door. A man was fixing her, but he was also fucking her, his dick was already sliding into her smooth as a needle into its waiting. He grabbed the guy by the hair and yanked him out of the car.

  She imagines him showing up at this bar and walking across the floor exactly the same as walking across their front lawn during the incident. She can see him stepping closer to her hair, whipping around as she dances too hard with a woman.

  She remembers during the incident how he grabbed her left arm. The needle ripping across her upturned flesh, ripping a second mouth open in the pale and infant-thin skin. She remembers laughing, but there was blood coming from her arm. Her left arm the bruise her left arm the poem her left arm their fucked-up love her arm her past story of herself. Emergency. Emergency room. Her blood cleaned up and put back into her, their love put back into her, her arm sutured and bandaged.

  In the club she’s dance-humping a woman who’d been her lover once upon a time. She is in full motion, sweat, the pounding of sound, bodies beating each other for all they’re worth. She’s deaf with desire and wet movement. She’s a blur. She’s smudging herself into moving particles, a streak of atoms.

  And then he is there. His hand there in the club. On her shoulder. Her hair. She spins a bit, then stops, seeing his face in the club mirror. She looks at him, and he looks back for a long minute.

  He grabs her arm in sharp interruption. She knows that hand like the back of her hand. She spins round to face him, and his face, and his pulling her outside, and their yelling in a parking lot, and her pounding the metal of the car, and his throwing her against it, and his getting in to drive away from her, and her opening the passenger-side door, and his yanking it closed against her, and her arm breaking there, blue, red, bone, her arm in the door, her arm their life, her bandaged arm shattering like sticks.

  * * *

  • • •

  YEAR FOUR. Road tripping. Somewhere near the coast. A roadside park. Redwoods and tree needles, and California has a smell. Cooking up mushrooms in a Cup-a-Soup at a picnic table. Cross-country. Crossing country. Landmasses. Flight. Then their bodies began to numb, they yawned, they laughed, colors changed shape, and little vague star shapes clattered at the edges of their vision.

  Sitting together, they watched a drunken man climb up the side of the embankment there at the roadside park. He was a Rasta, with a long black ponytail and pockmarked
skin; with his rainbow-crocheted hat and sleeveless white T-shirt and khaki shorts, he seemed like a cartoon. He looked a hundred years older than he was. They watched mesmerized as he climbed, pulling on shrubs and branches and shit, getting smaller and smaller as he scrambled up the hill. She laughed, almost under her breath. He put his hand beneath her shirt. Cupped her breast, then felt her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. It felt to him like a ball bearing. Then the man lost his grip and tumbled slow-motion Technicolor back down the hill, head over heels, all the way to the road, where he landed with a splat. Or a bone crash. Everyone, which was just the three of them, kept still for about a minute. Then he stood up and walked away like it was the most normal thing in the universe.

  They got their mountain bikes out and decided to ride them onto the freeway. An excellent plan. On the freeway they saw colors shooting by like molecules or corpuscles or DNA strands.

  After several hours and some food and some whiskey and an attempt at fucking that turned into a nap, they came back to themselves. They got into the car again and drove off, blasting the Doors on the car CD player. She was laughing. She had whiskey all over her body. She always was clumsy, like a kid. They came around a California-coast turn in the road, and everything stopped. Cars ahead of them with their brake lights on like beady animal eyes all in a row. There was an accident. They saw the ambulance. They saw guys with uniforms carrying a stretcher, broken glass scattered, smashed metal like a disgruntled face. They saw a guy on the stretcher with a big beige neck brace, his skin paler than two-percent milk. He was covered with blood and something the color of iodine, and his mouth, his eyes, had gone slack, as if everything had been driven out of him. His arm dangled off the side of the stretcher; it looked bigger than it should, like a crab claw. She was laughing. Always laughing during the most horrible moments. He wanted to clock her one, but he didn’t. Instead he drove them slow as blood beyond this scene.