“You’re still here,” she said softly, warm breath against him shiver. “Don’t you know, the more you come back, the more I’ll hurt you?”
Was she laughing, was she crying? Was that him making that sound? She was twisting the needle … she was twisting him deeper … no, he said, he said it again, he wouldn’t go back to her. And every time, he found himself calling her again and again and again, as if under some hypnotic spell he couldn’t break. They didn’t date and they didn’t hold hands or cuddle in the park, they just met and fucked or whatever you call what she was doing to him, carving her name meticulously across his chest (the sound of plastic irritated him anywhere he heard it, she said she didn’t want to get blood on her sheets) and it made him feel somehow sick and not like a person so he started appearing at her jobs. She had two of them. She always seemed pleasantly surprised to see him mostly, but if he came upstairs to see her like at that place on the West End she would be too busy to see him for long and would tell him she’d call him. And maybe she would, maybe not. And the next day he would show up at her other job, that small copy shop on Prince Street. “Good baby,” she said, finishing the last a on JOANNA carved deep across his chest, a jagged bloodied wound that stung him with daily pain no matter how he moved. Then she just stopped calling him. And he wouldn’t go to the West End anymore, he was still trying to figure out how she worked that, how she made that yellow red black happen, how the day after she called him.
“I want to see you so bad,” she said. “I almost can’t stand it.”
He was lying in bed, in the darkened room, his hands in a bowl of ice.
“I can’t see you tonight,” he said. “My hands are messed up.”
That night when she straddled him she asked him if he was a very bad boy last night, driving the knitting needle through his calf as she rode his squirmy twitchings
a scream and a scream and bloodstains on the mirror. And he was standing across the street, like always, waiting but he kept appearing at the copy shop, the whole morning until noon, when she would appear on her way to her car. And she might say a few words to him, she always said she would call him. And he would take that home with him like a blessing from the pope. And all the time he was going there, standing across the street from the copy shop, he wasn’t aware that someone had seen him and been watching him. He had maybe seen the guy before, shaggy-haired, bearded, lying there in a side alley beside an Italian deli that made the block reek of fresh salami.
“Hey,” he said, gaps in his teeth visible when he spoke, “what’s her name.”
O (who wasn’t O yet, not consciously) looked at the copy shop across the street, then at the bum lying there by the green Dumpster.
“It’s not like I’m asking you your name,” he said. “What’s her name?”
O felt a strange chill.
“How do you know it’s about a her?”
Myron smiled, looking over at the copy shop.
“You just look like one of the chosen. Winner of the yellow drink. They use women, you know. Send them out to hook people to the machine. Sick, crazy women. Some guys, they think they meet women. But it’s the woman who meets them.”
O had that strange feeling, almost like when he was with Joanna. He wanted to get away and at the same time wanted more.
“Do you get the feeling you’re losing control of yourself since you met her? That day in, day out, you can’t stop thinking about her or the things she does to you? That something inside drives you to do insane, mindless things?”
O almost nodded. His lips moved. Nothing came out. A weird electric pulse.
“Some people think that’s love. Am I right? Do you think that’s love, what she does to you? Think about that one real hard.”
“I don’t know what to call it,” O said, his head feeling light.
“It’s a psyop. A mental manipulation. You’ve been picked up by an agent.”
“An agent?”
Something inside O buckled. It made him immediately think of cops, of that moment he saw the video on his TV a long time ago, was it a long time ago? A video clip of a guy in a hood, going down a stairwell. It made him throw out his TV set.
“That’s right.” Myron leaned back against the Dumpster, his lips pursed with disgust. “That copy shop right there is a front for a domestic CIA operation.”
“A what?”
“A front. A holding station for CIA operatives who run operations on civilians.”
O laughed, maybe it was relief, maybe it was just funny, a good way to take that shine off those creepy words, those words that resonated with him still. A fucking relief that the guy was nuts, right?
“Hear voices? They want you to hear one voice, but they haven’t perfected the machine, so you hear a lot of them. Have to filter it out. Like radio static.”
“Yeah right,” O said. “Maybe you get too much sun here. Can I give you a buck, so you can go get yourself a sandwich?”
Myron looked at him, eyes glimmering with knowing, knowing something, and O saw something else: compassion, some kindness that seemed to come from above, and this touch of sadness as he looked over at the copy shop.
“Her name was Mira,” he said, “pronounced meer-ah. She was from Vermont. She picked me up in a bar because I had a red drink. Isn’t that funny?”
O felt a sick tremor in his stomach, an electric pang. “Mine was red,” he wanted to say, he wanted to say, he said nothing.
“A lot of that is blurry. She did things to me, awful things. A year ago, that was me, standing here like you. Watching her come and go. Until that one day when she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. Poof. Transferred to another shop in Chicago.”
Again that moment, just when things were starting to chime, then comes a line that makes O think the guy is fucking with him. He peeled off a buck.
“Look, man, you’re starting to waste my time, okay?”
Myron took the dollar.
“Right, right. Don’t let me disturb you from just standing there. You can’t help it. You’re driven. Stuff is happening and you don’t know why. Right? And it all started when you met her, didn’t it? Didn’t it?”
O couldn’t stand there anymore. He left, even though he hadn’t seen Joanna, he went straight to the subway with Myron’s words ringing in his head and this strange feeling that he was being monitored would not go away and for some reason he fought off the urge to call her. And the next day he fought off the urge to go down there at all or even to call her, but the morning after that he showed up bright and early and when he got there he almost felt like he was looking for this guy and when he didn’t see him, he felt relief and disappointment at the same time that he could see Joanna inside the copy shop behind some machines, and he got a scared feeling standing there, and then the voice came from inside the alley.
“Just when I thought you were getting the message,” Myron said with disgust.
“What message is that,” O said, lighting a cigarette and looking over at the copy shop.
“To get away. To just run as far and as fast as you can,” he said, “before you do something bad.”
A red heat crept up O’s back.
“Bad like what, bad like what.” O felt like he was falling into a trance.
“Something you can’t control. It comes on you like an attack. It’s all colors and sounds. You can’t control your hands. They’ll do stuff while you watch. You know what I’m saying?”
Myron had gotten up from his spot, had edged closer. O was sweating, blinking fast, frantic puffs. He tossed the cigarette.
“Oh ho,” Myron said, noticing O was wearing gloves on his hands. “I see you’ve been punching the walls lately.”
It didn’t occur to O anymore to act like he didn’t know what the guy was talking about. It was too painfully obvious that Myron was on to something, though his rocky road to truth and enlightenment was dotted with detours.
“Not walls,” O said pensively. “Not
walls.”
O peeled off a bill.
“Get yourself something,” he said.
Myron looked at the bill a moment but didn’t take it.
“I won’t take the dollar,” he said, “but I’ll take a sandwich. And a carbonated beverage.”
O looked into Myron’s bottomless eyes.
He’s thinking no time like the present to make a change, any change is good, but how many times has he moved this year already? The idea of being in one place for a long time terrifies him, even waiting for the subway, standing at the bus stop. Can’t hide his face enough. Avert the eyes, look away, hood on, baseball cap low over the eyes. Anything with official documents, credit cards, ATMs, any kind of official transaction … because then they can find you, find you easier, every transaction leaves a trace and maybe even a video trail. YES he is ESPECIALLY upset about surveillance cameras and these shits are everywhere, can’t even have a smoke outside the hotel regulation distance: two hundred feet from the door WITHOUT being taped. He’s getting better at thinking that way all the time, being aware … no, the best thing he did, really, to quit his job when he did. Sure, he misses his old friend, Nero, who used to take him out on the town, the principal reason he met Joanna. (These days, because of Myron, he tends to see everything in terms of connections, the one thing that leads to the other.) This just mentioning her name like this is enough to send him careening back into the past, to play the old game of trying to make sense of what had happened to him, some process that started when she came into his life. Now he fights it, because Myron says the most important thing to do is chop up the story forever in your brain in parts, and label those parts any way you want so you can remember them. But don’t go into the past so much. Fight the urge for flashback. And so he fights the urge, battles to stay in the present. The right now. The minute you step into was, you’re lost. To stay in the present: the new apartment. Located on a tree-lined stretch of Dawson Street, an apartment in a private house, top floor, creaky boards, ancient wood smell to the stairs, rooms small and mostly empty. He buys a bed, he buys a sofa. He gets a TV and a DVD player and then decides to stop spending money because he doesn’t have a job right now and is living off savings. And it may be a little tight for a while, there is NO WAY he’s going back to live with his mother. (And maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t have a job now, right now, time to figure this out.) Again this somehow feels like he’s slipping into past and he doesn’t want that so he decides instead to stay in the present and head downtown to see if he can find Myron and that usually is easy because Myron is usually always camped out somewhere across the street from the copy shop on Lafayette Street, which is where he met Myron because he went to the shop looking for Joanna (and that brings us back to doe, doe, doe, doe). And no matter how much he tries to stay present by thinking of images of sitting in the subway, black tunnel walls speeding by in the windows, he can’t stop it. Maybe it was Myron’s fault why it happened. Maybe it was Myron that led him to do that, to be in that particular place right at the moment when the sound came, and the red, the yellow, the black. But it couldn’t be Myron. Myron knew the truth. Myron was a voice, a guiding light. He couldn’t doubt him, he shouldn’t. The moment you showed doubt, it would be over. It was the same with the Great Pumpkin. It was easy—Myron only said he should forget this Joanna woman fast and go find another one because nothing takes a screw out of the wall like another screw. And he shouldn’t be tailing her and he shouldn’t be showing up at her jobs, he shouldn’t even try talking to her. And Myron said that to him with great certainty even though M hadn’t told him anything about her at all. (He was calling himself M now because Myron said it was good to only use letters in your brain when you think of yourself, never mention your name or even think it, because the machines can pick that up and hone in on you.) Now M wanted to go downtown and tell him what was really happening.
He hadn’t told Myron about the red the yellow the black, but somehow he got the feeling from the things Myron said that he already knew about that. It had to be true what he was saying, so when he said go find another screw, M went out that night to a spot near the Bruckner Expressway, all the way up Southern Boulevard. There was an old warehouse there that had been converted into a disco, and all kinds of business was possible all along that street. The girls walked up and down the block. They dotted the block where the disco was, walking amongst the small clusters of people milling around, either because they came out of the disco or they were going in or they came out for a smoke or to buy drugs or to get some air, spandex asses and shiny minidresses reflecting the lights that started to blind him, this thing with the eyes is how it started last time. And the noise and the sound, the beat pounding into his brain like a mad, merciless hammer. Turned, not to walk on the block where the disco was, turned away and the noise was still hurting him. Brittle and weak, less people now or he just couldn’t see them, colors and he just wanted to get away from the sound. Felt like he was on the edge of a cliff and the wind would knock him down. And then it happened, that sharp hot jab of a sharp blade sliding across his ribs, the sharp edge leaving a trail of red that she rubbed with her hands, the caked salt sending jolts of stinging pain through him. (Blot out the sound. Blot out … he pulled the hood up over his head.)
“No Joanna,” he pleaded, “please don’t.”
that song. The one she started it all with, the one she started
And he spun around right at the moment when she came out of the alley, she came out of there or she was in there and he didn’t know why she was there or why she came out at him when he was trying to just pass fast and get away, he wanted to get away but something held him there, she was saying something to him and the flashes were making it hard to see and her dress was red and her dress was yellow and her legs were black fishnet stockings and he said get away from me please, and she said I’m not going to hurt you, and she laughed and why was she laughing? and he told her to make it stop and she laughed and said honey I can’t make it
stop
and he pulled her and pushed her all at once, or they fell or he was falling, and nothing could stop it slamming the door slamming the door and it was so fast but the harder he slammed the smaller the sound got and the colors got better. He could see her face disintegrating as if caught behind the motion of his fist in a strobe. Blood splash, teeth, crackling bones on a witch doctor’s necklace, a pulpy squishy mass twitching and bucking and squealing sounds that ended with the thunder boom of her body collapsing against the metal Dumpster, the way she fell all broken doll. No movement, no breath. Suddenly, no sound. Or a different sound, but that one, special sound, no longer.
The street exhaled.
Daybreak
S.J. ROZAN
ON YOUR KNEES!”
The savage’s words roared down with hopeless finality, recalling the thunder of the boulders that rolled from the breached walls of her father’s city to lie mute and useless on the plain. Even now, after all these weeks in the barbarian kingdom, she comprehended little of what was said to her. But this phrase she understood, and understood as well the pain and penalty for disobedience. She knelt.
He gazed, grinning, at her ivory skin and huge dark eyes. Her hair rippled like blue-black silk, glinting even in the sickly fluorescent light. Her pink nipples stood from her breasts, hardened not by desire, he knew, but dread. Her fear inflamed him; and even more, her pride. He waited until he could barely stand it, so he could watch the beads of cold sweat form on her brow as she bent motionless before him. Then he barked the command. Flinching, she raised her slender hands, and slowly, the way he liked it, she worked his zipper down. He marveled at her movements, her control, steeling herself even against her own trembling. He could make her weep in pain—he had—but not from terror, or despair, though he knew she felt both, felt them more powerfully every day. He’d never known a girl like this. He wondered how long it would take, what it would take, to break her.
When first her father sent her int
o barbarian lands she had been frightened, but proud to go. A bride as tribute to the conqueror was an ancient tradition in wars across the land and across the ages. Her father had chosen her of all her sisters. That alone proclaimed her value. She set her chin high and determined he would not have reason to regret his decision. The savage would find her an obedient, industrious, and honorable wife. She would behave exactly as she would have if married to a prince of the people.
She was good, he gave her that: supple fingers, a tireless tongue. She’d discovered early what pleased him and when, though sometimes, just for the fun of it, he’d smack her for doing something he’d ordered her to do the day before. Most of the girls he bought were stupid, they whined and cried and weren’t worth the trouble. Some of them, when it dawned on them what their mommies and daddies had sold them into, they went nuts, batshit nuts. Even though his trafficker knew what he wanted, even though he paid top dollar, he often got losers. He had to admit that made a kind of sense. What parents would sell a girl they could turn out themselves, who could work the streets of home and keep the money coming? He could use whatever he got, no question, but some of them didn’t last long. But this one was something special. Of course, once he broke her pride, she’d be like the others and the magic would be gone. The thrill he got from the spark of hate in her eyes, the anger she suppressed like her own shivering: He’d miss that, once he extinguished it.
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