Symptomatic

by Danzy Senna

  A slapping of hands. A deep voice I didn’t recognize. “’Sup.”

  They whispered together in the hall. I caught the words “out of hand” and “party hardy” and “stupid bitch thought she was going somewhere.”

  I tilted my body to the side so that I could peer down the hall. I wanted to glimpse this Amadeus—the one stranger present. I wanted him to see me, bound and vomiting this blood-colored garment. He would see me and he would respond. He would call the police and tell them what was going on up here.

  Jiminy was dressed in the same attire I’d seen him in the last time: a huge parka and oversized pants and unlaced sneakers. Amadeus stood beside him, a scrawny white kid with cornrows. Blond cornrows, like Bo Derek’s. He peered down the hall at me and seemed to meet my gaze—but didn’t respond to what he saw. He only nodded to Steely Dan and looked away, back at her.

  She had her hand on her hip. “So where’s the booze?”

  Jiminy shrugged, his palms up, and mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  She shook her head. “I told your ass to bring the booze. How’re we gonna have a party, you idiot, without some liquor?”

  He stepped back, hands still held out. “I tole you. It’s Sunday. Motherfucking liquor store ain’t open—”

  She cut him off. “And with all the clowns and junkies and hookers you know,” she was hollering now, “not one of them could spare a fucking bottle of scotch?”

  “Don’t push me, V. You’re pushing me.”

  The music on the stereo had switched to America. Well, I keep on thinkin’ ‘bout you, sister golden hair surprise …

  “Shut your mouth.”

  Jiminy stuck his chest out like a rooster. “No, why don’t you shut your mouth?”

  She wagged her hand up in his face. “’Cause your ass is a liar. That’s why. I don’t even know why you came here tonight. You think I wanted to see you so badly? You think it was your illustrious company I was after?”

  I listened to their voices and stared at the darkened television. I had sat on this very couch these past months, eating my egg foo yong and gulping my Chilean chardonnay, watching one sitcom after another. Now I could see my reflection, tiny and strange in the gray-green glass. I looked pathetic with the sweater spilling out of my mouth.

  Down the hall, Jiminy was sucking his teeth. “Don’t talk all proper with me.”

  “Sorry, I forgot you’re dyslexic.”

  “No, you did not just say that. A’ight. A’ight. Thass it. I’ve had it with you and your crazy-assed schemes. Every year it’s a new name, a new game. But you never get far, V, do you? You always end up back here, stewin’ in your own shit.”

  There was a sudden commotion. Somebody slapped somebody; I heard a squeaking of sneakered feet, grunting, shouts. I closed my eyes and waited for the neighbors to open their doors, to intervene. But the commotion died down as quickly as it started.

  “Yo, Cricket, man, let’s split,” Amadeus was saying. “This party’s dead as a motherfucking president. Dwayne said they hired a stripper up on Pacific Street. They got mad weed, too.”

  The magic words.

  “No joke?” Jiminy said. “Cool. We out.” As they shuffled out the door, he yelled back over his shoulder, “And don’t ask me for no more favors—beeyatch.”

  “You’re a real piece of shit, Jiminy!” she screamed out at him in the hall, before slamming the door shut.

  CLAUDE TOLD ME something else about myself. It was four months into our relationship. We were in his graduate housing suite, hanging out with his roommate, a computer engineer named Jarvis, with dark skin and a soft, Southern drawl. The living room was unlit except for a single candle burning on the coffee table. Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” played on the stereo. Jarvis and Claude and I passed a joint among us until we were burning our fingertips. We were quiet, each in our own private bubble, bobbing our heads to the music, when all of a sudden Claude blurted out, “See, Jarvis, the thing about mules”—he looked at me, smirking through the candlelight—“is they can go either way. They either get the best of both worlds—the strength of the donkey and the showmanship of the Thoroughbred horse—or the worst of their lineage—the braying stubbornness of a donkey and the genetic weakness, rubbery limbs, and low IQ of an overbred horse. You just never know. It’s the luck of the draw.” He leaned forward and picked up a lock of my hair, rubbed it between his fingers as if he were shopping for quality bed linen, before letting it drop. “In other words, chicks like this? They either end up genius messiahs, or craven hybrid monstrosities. But they’ll never be ordinary. No, sir. Bubbling away in this one’s blood are the ingredients for something quite extraordinary.”

  “Man,” Jarvis said. “Why are you talking so much shit?”

  “I’m telling you. It’s true!”

  Jarvis looked at me. “This asshole’s just messing with you. He knows full well they don’t make mules like that anymore. Shit, that breed went out of style with the hula hoop. Mulattos these days are all ordinary and well adjusted. Even a little boring.” He sighed, and began to roll a new joint. “Almost makes you miss the old head cases.”

  I HEARD her footsteps pattering down the hall toward me. They were light, like a ghost’s or a child’s. A moment later, she stood in the doorway, head tilted back, watching me. “I feel like I’ve known you forever.”

  She sat beside me on the couch, so close I could smell the gardenia and sweat on her skin. Her bathrobe had flapped open slightly, so that I could see her thigh where the flecks of wax had dried on her skin. She slid her hands under her thighs and rocked back and forth for a moment, biting her lip and glancing at me as if she was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Finally, she began to speak, her eyes on the coffee table.

  “When I was a kid I used to lie in bed imagining that somewhere out there was a girl just like me. I could see her, lying in a bed on the other side of the country, crying into a pillow because she was all alone. And whenever I felt like a freak—the fucking half-caste misfit that everybody wanted but nobody loved—I would think about this little girl so far away and I would feel better. I used to pray for you at night, Rocky. I used to pray that you would make it, survive, you know? So that we could meet some day. Because I knew that if we could just come together, everything would be okay.” Her eyes were those of an alert and feverish confessor. “You know as well as I do: It’s a good game, this thing we do. I can become whoever the fuck people want me to be. I can switch from ghettoese to the Queen’s English at the drop of a dime. I can shake my ass and I can do the fucking fox trot. I can make a white man feel like he’s with the most bodacious black girl alive, all earthy brown sugar and grits, and I can make a brother feel like he’s got the whitest white girl beneath him. I know how to please them all, but it gets tiring. You know that as well as I do. It gets tiring and, after a while, you’re moving so fast, just to survive this game, you forget who you really are. The original you? That’s what I forgot. Until I met you.”

  She turned to face me now, and her eyes fixed on a spot beside my face. Whatever she saw there seemed to me now both a total figment of her imagination and at the same time real. I could almost feel its heat and hear its breathing.

  “I remember the first time we really spoke. Do you remember that? I was like, whew! We’re here! It’s finally happened! I met her. You. Us. God, it was crazy, wasn’t it? I mean, it was like everybody else faded away. Nobody else mattered in that stupid room except you and me and that we were there, finally, together.”

  I tried to remember the meeting, and it seemed that she was right, because I could not remember anybody else from that day, any other faces in that room but hers, smiling at me, eyes bright and eager, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in her hand.

  “You know why you’re here, right?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes, you do. You know why you came back here tonight.” Her eyes were shining, wet, but she was smiling, too. They didn’t go together, those t
wo parts of her face. “We’re going to do it, Rocky. Tonight. We’re going away. We’re going to go so far away nobody will ever find us. It’ll be beautiful. I promise. And we’ll be together. So don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. Oh there now, don’t cry.” She wiped my tears away with her fingers. “There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all. I’ll be right by your side. I won’t let go.”

  SHE LED ME down the hall to the bedroom, a carving knife she’d fetched from the kitchen held up against my back.

  There, she made me sit, still bound and gagged, in the corner beside the bed, while she pulled out the two silver dresses from the closet. She flung one on the bed and began to pull the other over her head as she talked.

  “We’re gonna have a poetry reading,” she said, as she fiddled with the wraparound sash. “A poetry slam. Up on the roof, just you and me, staring down over this good-for-nothing city. I’m gonna read to you, you’re gonna listen. Finally. You’ll shut your trap and listen. You think I was always like this. But you’re wrong. You don’t know the half of it. I used to be young. I used to be just like you, cocksure and filled with so much fucking potential I nearly exploded. I’ll show you who I was at your age.”

  She was in her dress now. It fit her awkwardly, stretching too tight across her breasts, too loose across her middle. She waved the knife at me. “Stand up.”

  I clambered to my feet.

  She unbound my hands, pulled the gag out of my mouth. I didn’t fight or scream but kept my eyes fixed on the knife.

  “Put that on.”

  I put it on, the other silver dress. It was too small. I squeezed in my gut and zipped it up the side.

  She sat on the bed. “Turn around. Do a little dance.”

  She held the knife lightly on her lap.

  I turned in circles, slowly, dizzy, aching, tilting my head from side to side.

  “Cute, real cute.”

  I kept spinning slowly.

  “You can stop turning now.”

  I did. She came toward me and moved her hands around her face. “Can you do something with your hair?”

  I made a show of teasing it with my fingers.

  She shook her head. “Never mind, it’s not doing any good. I’ve got to do something with your face. Jesus. I don’t want this mug staring at me while I read my work.”

  IT WAS ALREADY FOUR in the morning by the time we made it to the roof. She held the knife lightly against my back. She’d smeared makeup on me downstairs, in the bright lights of the bathroom—sparkly blue eye shadow, hot-pink blush, magenta lipstick. My hair lay in Shirley Temple ringlets around my face. The ends smelled burned from the curling iron.

  We went through the heavy metal door. Outside. It had stopped snowing. The sky was a plum swirl against electric blue. The air was frigid, burning really, the way cold things can sometimes be. She gestured with the knife to a spot on the snow and I squatted there and tried to stop my teeth from chattering as I waited for her to begin the poetry reading.

  She seemed unaffected by the temperature as she paced before me in high heels, holding a battered black journal she’d fetched from the back of the closet. She read in a breathless rush, so that it was hard to tell where one poem ended and one began.

  “Broken, breaking, broke, and I’m outta dope. My cranial cavity is festering with worms, and I see monkeys in the most unlikely of places…. Her breath smells of peach schnapps, stomach acid, a night she can no longer remember. The Honorable Willie Coker. A man who is not a man but an object of her desire, he is being watched and he doesn’t even know it. Look. Right there. Coming out of the building. Doesn’t he look funny. In that judge’s gown? Lien, the bills lean on me. I got a letter today, says they will garnish my wages with parsley. Chameleon, have you ever wondered how a girl disappears? You know, walks away from the bills and the bullshit. Straight up vanishes? Well lean in, sister, And listen closely, Cause I know the trick. You just take a deep breath. And jump … Go figure, My washcloth smells like somebody else’s face and my feet are cracked with some kind of fungus. There’s a fly that won’t die who lives in my sink and a Mexican cockroach who sings me to sleep at night. La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha, my belly button is full of lint and there are stains like spilled tea in the crotch of my underwear. I found a single hair, thick and wiry, growing out of my chin yesterday, and some dimples that shouldn’t be there on my butt. Hand me that bottle, Jiminy. I need a fix … Psst. Come close. I’ll let you in on a secret. My best girlfriend is tiny, fits in the palm of my hand. She laughs at my jokes and cries for my pain, she lives for me only and doesn’t complain….”

  I was aware as I listened of a million potential saviors all around us, of how the gravel sparkled with diamonds, and of how close she kept swinging to the edge of the roof as she raved on. The air smelled of kitty litter and ammonia. I could hear chanting from a house party still in full throttle. The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn. Burn motherfucker. Burn. The poems kept coming. I heard a window open and a man’s enraged sleepy voice shouting, “Shut the fuck up!”

  At some point I looked up and saw that the sky was peach. When had that happened? Behind her, in the distance, I saw people out on Fulton Street, walking dogs, waiting for buses. And Flo. There she was, holding a cup of coffee and leaning against a car, talking to somebody in the driver’s seat.

  I looked back at Greta. She was pacing back and forth in a wobbly goose step, barking the poems up at the whitening sky. Her skin shone like pale wax. I began to crawl toward the corner of the roof, at an acute angle from where she stood. I would gesture to Flo. She would see me and she would understand what was happening. I would not need to say a word. I crawled, not breathing, the gravel beneath the snow embedding itself into my palms and knees. Flo was looking up just now, and I waved my arm at her. But she just sipped her coffee and looked away as if she had not seen me. Behind me the poetry had stopped. There was only silence, and then the sound of snow crunching under footsteps. I turned my face in time to see her rushing at me, knife raised. Flashes of silver. The dress. The metal. I tried to move past her, but there was a slash of contact and I felt a warm rush of pain in my abdomen. The inside. That mystery space. What my mother calls the invisible world. Then, before I could stagger off, she had me in an embrace so tight my arms were pinned to my sides. We were intertwined. My blood was seeping out into the space between us. Onto my dress, onto her dress. The blood felt warm, like somewhere I’d like to be. She was warm, too, a perfumey heat that engulfed me. We staggered around in circles this way, a crazy dance. She sobbed and tried to pull us toward the edge. That beautiful place. I tried to pull back, aware of the wetness in my middle, aware that my vision was blurring slightly. Guess it’s true what they say. Who said that? Voices and sounds came to me from every direction. A dog began to bark. A car alarm went off. A man in a window down below said, “Arriba!” and laughed at his own joke.

  I twisted and arched my back until finally I was able to lift my arms and push back and away. I heard her cry, first loud, then fainter, as the distance between us grew.

  LATER, down on Fulton Street, after the ambulance and police cars had come and gone, after the witnesses to the fall had given their statements, after I had been questioned and believed, I stood at the edge of the crowd, my hastily packed Samsonite beside me. The wound was superficial. I’d left the stained silver dress in the basement trash, all balled up in a plastic bag. Around me, it seemed that everyone in the neighborhood had come out of their houses, settlers and natives alike. In the half-light of early morning, they sipped their coffee and chattered to one another about the tragedy, their faces ablaze with excitement.

  “Hate to say it,” Flo was saying to a cluster of rapt faces. “But I saw it coming. We all saw it coming. There was only one way that story was gonna end.”

  Beside her, Corky nodded. “Ain’t it the truth?”

  27

  M Y FATHER TELLS ME that the further you get away from
an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don’t fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.

  My mother has other opinions. She says the soul is forged through suffering; every hardship is a lesson in disguise.

  It has been five years since I left New York—five years since I walked away from that apartment, from that crowd of strangers on the sidewalk. I have returned to the city where I got lost so many years ago. I have given up on nonfiction. I am working toward the most useless of degrees. I study the art of lying. My teacher, a tall, somber woman who wrote a novel about a midget, tells me that I am “learning to inhabit the space between truth and fiction.” She says that I am at my best when I lose control. “You must keep climbing into that abyss where nothing is certain. And don’t worry about what really happened. It’s only the logic of the lie that matters here.”

  I live in my own apartment now—a two-room studio on the second floor of a stained pink stucco apartment complex not far from the beach. It’s drab, but it’s funny how you can love something, anything, when you know it is yours. I only see what’s beautiful about the place: the way the light falls across the living room in the evenings, a gold-peach rectangle that grows thinner and thinner until it is just a sliver and then gone. And the view from my patio of the ocean, only seven blocks away. It looks like a slice of fallen sky.

  I don’t even mind the flaws of the place, like the rust stains in the bathtub or the worn spots on the carpet or the way you have to jiggle the toilet handle to make the water stop running. Or even the way the kitchen floor sits at a crooked angle, tilted by the earthquake that shook the area a few years ago.

  I live alone but I am not lonely. I have new friends from the university. Each of them comes from somewhere else. Vietnam. Ohio. Oakland. Mexico City. And old friends, too, not so far away. Lola lives across town in Silverlake, with her girlfriend. She met Bunmi on her travels, or as she likes to say, “Had to go all the way to the motherland to find me a woman.” And Ivers. He ended up on this coast, too. He lives in a shack in Venice Beach. He and I are friends now. Our breakup was gradual, soft, like a metal settling into its permanent form. We see each other every few weeks. We always say we’re going to go somewhere, but we always end up just driving. Not to get anywhere, just to move. We cruise through the city, pointing out what is beautiful and what is ugly about this outpost where we have landed. A billboard of a surgically enhanced blonde. A one-armed Mexican selling oranges at the intersection. The way the store signs change languages—Korean, Russian, Spanish—from block to block. Beside him, I feel that I am everywhere and I am nowhere, and what happened before seems very far away, like another girl’s life altogether.