Then you creep down the stairs. Dizzy and shivering on the outside, but on the inside, stealth and calm.
As you move fast and rhythmically to the door you aren’t sure what it is you’re running from or to. You hit the metal gate in front of the door with your entire body, expecting it to swing open, but it doesn’t. It’s locked from the inside.
You crumple, nearly faint against the door. And you picture that black metal key the man used when you came in, but you were kissing, eating his face, and blind in that moment.
Almost used to it now. Crawl spaces. Hiding out. Waiting for the right moment. But to maintain your focus, you need to be on the move. You need to get back into the water and swim, and for several moments you lose focus entirely as light-headedness feels restful against thoughts of being underwater. But you are trapped in this house. Its open, marbled hallways are claustrophobic. Static objects on the walls: a print of a stylized woman demurely looking out from under a hat, a ceramic shell that juts shiny and menacingly in mauve from the wall; the energy of the villa is blown out and glossy, cut off from the warmth of breezes outside. The hum of the air conditioner sends out radiating waves of depression through your body. You feel the hidden dust, the whiff of a rotten banana in the kitchen garbage, the tang of bubbly left over in your mouth. What was familiar and comforting is now eerily foreign. You are trapped. Need something to do. Thankfully a pack of cigarettes appears in your line of vision. You slump to the floor in the laundry room next to the front door and smoke so you can breathe again. And make a plan. However much you squeeze your eyes shut and beckon the swell of the ocean, nothing happens, you toss between wake and nausea and sleep. You pull damp towels over you to stay hidden and warm. You try to conjure the snake that led you safely to the young man’s house, and again get nothing, no guiding image, until finally the girlfriend arrives home in the early hours of the morning. She is careless with the door and you exit without any fuss.
You slip out into the dawn with her things in the bag, running barefoot down Folly Road. The hedges are short and bright, they smell fresh compared to your skin. At the entranceways you see the maids just arrived, you see them bending and gathering. A woman with her dog looks straight into your eyes as you go by.
Day seven dead
(Bunny and Shark.)
THE FLASH OF TINTED WINDOWS, and a car rolls by. You put your turbaned head down and keep walking. Will you be seen? All the bad things that could happen to you race through your mind. For a second, out into the warm, open air, you can’t see straight. Then you run a little, get your feet back, feel like you’re getting somewhere. Fluttering above the deeper layers of fear are coke-infused images, delusions of grandeur so overwhelming your limbs start to expand, you feel whole feet taller. You feel like your skin is burning and electric. Your eyes sharp, they whip from street to rock face to car to bush, and finally all you see and all that drives you on are the contorted faces of three men: the bastard’s mixed expression of agony as he threw you over, the young man grimacing with orgasm, the horrified mask of the last man you just ran from. All three merge together like one great floating head, culminating as the singular expression of your power. Your breath goes shallow. Like you are infused again with dolphin sense. Except with more edge and an appetite for revenge. You question your sudden lack of softness. The image fades, and you become fixated on a lawnmower – your head slowly follows it, and turns, but your body keeps going straight. Bam! You go down. Whimper. What was that? “Shit!” You are disoriented, scrambling with your hands and feet at the garbage you’ve spilled. Bottles scatter as you make your way back up. You jog-walk away from it, close to the edge of the road. The villas blush a full spectrum of pastel at you as you pass, and your temple pulses with a fresh outpouring of blood. You feel the turban get soaked. Bushes scratch your face and hands, the leaves prick you, they smell of fertilizer. The tang in your nostrils makes you gag.
Your feet burn, are hot, wet and stuck with stones and bits of glass. Blood and pus seem to squirt from multiple openings on the soles of your feet. You stumble, nearly fall, catch yourself on another useless wiry bush. Hold back tears. Hate this scene of black road and bubble-gum houses that never end. Your skin goes cold, then agonizingly hot. Then cold again. A trickle of sweat runs in a dead-straight line down your back. You have to get back there, to the ocean, to the drift-feel of darkness and swimming. Go straight there. To the cool easy pulse of your arms pushing through water. Gentle swift kicks. A straight path to water. Pull yourself together. You aren’t sure you won’t faint.
You close your eyes and wish hard for the serenity of the green snake’s curling pathway. It was so graceful, looping its way into the kingdom of the jungle. For ten seconds, your head feels light and your heart free of any fear. But the drug pains crash in on you again, and sweat blasts through the pores of your body. Get it straight. You just got mixed up. You have to go straight to the bastard. To the source. Just get to the water and wash away all the cocaine. Get strong again. You pull at the gold dress, beg it to stop clinging to you that way. Finally you reach the bottom of the hill. A coconut-seller is hacking away on large green nut with his machete. A jovial group of workers are making their way up to Folly Road. Not down. Like you, but you are tripping on bloodied feet, drenched in sweat, itching like mad.
“The water, the water, it’s okay, you’re gonna be fine,” scuffling along with your Hermès bag banging against your floppy ass, dropping it as you get near, your feet shushing through the sand, the sting of tiny grains in your wounds somehow exquisite. At the beach you throw yourself directly in. You close your eyes and let the cool saltiness take away all the hot salt from your skin. You lower yourself until your mouth goes underwater. The feel of getting clean of sand, of stones, of blood, of Folly fertilizers and flying bits of cut grass, of steely cars. Stop breathing. Go underwater now.
Bubbles erupt from your mouth. The turban unwinds and your hair inflates like a polyp of yellow cotton. A ribbon of pure red trails in a single, elegant strand alongside you. As you drift outwards, making soft dog paddles with your hands, the faces of the three men in your life loom up again behind your eyelids. The young man. The bastard. The man you nearly killed.
How strong you still are, you think. How capable. It’s possible to be a free, glowing being buoyed by the sun and the immensity of the ocean. Look at you out here alone at dawn living off the sea in secret like a happy vagabond: eating food no one notices, wearing clothes nobody even remembers having, sleeping on luxurious boats, one after the next, without a soul finding a trace of you. Betrayal equals freedom, you think.
When something hard and waxen bumps you. You assume you’ve paddled your way into someone’s surfboard, or boogey board. Or skiff with a silent motor attached. The last fits best with the tunnel of water you feel being tugged away from you. A small portion of the sea torn sideways. Right beside you. And then silently coming back into place. Rip then retreat. You blink calmly up at the sky as it comes into instant focus. Clouds split. And the words: do yourself a favour and run! Did you say that to yourself? Scanning fast, there is no boat anywhere near you. Your skin crawls, the faint hint of the sun’s heat is gone and all you feel is an intense chill. You can’t run on water, dummy Bunny. Calm down. But your heart has gone wild with some other memory, a physical one, rising up in you.
Then it bumps you again but this time harder. Stark awakening now, you see it. You bolt upright.
“Oh my god, no. No! It can’t be that. Run Bunny, run Bunny, run!” you whisper. The ocean becomes like thunder roiling up, it seems to lick up around you in flames made of blood from your feet. Your feet. Your fucking feet. Run feet, run, you fucking bloody feet.
You try to run through the tumult of water but it’s too deep. It’s too hard. The heave of your thighs, you will them to plough through the heavy waves. Oh god, don’t get me, don’t.
And now on shore you see people coming to life. Tiny figures in the distance pointing at you, running towards y
ou. They are too many impossible metres away from you. And in that flash of terror you recognize him: the young man is there sprinting across the sand.
“You bastard,” you whisper as your face falls flat in three feet of water, and the shark – who is trying to figure out if you are edible, not what you taste like, but what species you are – bites off one of your feet.
And without any more interest, swims off in the other direction.
The splash of your body hitting shallow water. Then the thud of hitting the sand underneath. Then a cacophany of tiny splashes all around you and voices screaming and the slow single wave of blood, the last wave that washes all the way up over your body before the young man and a woman pick you up in their arms.
The ocean returns to a ripple of white caps. Then calmness as the car, with you in the backseat laid out as good as a corpse, tears off in the direction of the family lands.
/ / /
“Which one is it?” Your voice is fragile, distant. Bright, hot daylight swirls around you through the car windows. The upward view a relentless blue sky without clouds. “The right or the left?”
“Lady, you don’t know?” says the woman. She’s in the backseat with you, frantically tying knots with some kind of cloth. But her face keeps expanding and contracting and the sun is whiting out everything until it all turns black.
Then all around you, quiet blue: cerulean paint and warmish air flowing in different directions like long, soft hair.
“Up to both knees all I feel is fire.” A large dry hand on your forehead.
“We picked you up lady, no one gonna take a person in your state to the hospital. You said it yourself, you got no insurance. No identity.”
Warm hand heavy on your head. You are laid out on a bed in a house fortified by the background sounds of women. The walls are flimsy and the system of fans tremendous. You wonder if the house won’t blow down.
“Here lady, here lady, we know what to do.” She is touching the fire in your leg, doing and undoing things. You feel something rip, then seep, as if your leg is metal getting melted down. Your leg seems to run right out of you and onto the floor. When you close your eyes, you smell the sweat roll off the green arc of the snake as it releases itself from one position to the next.
“You had this bag with you, lady,” she says. “You’ll wear those pretty shoes again. Don’t you worry about that.” On the wall hangs an outfit you don’t recognize, all frills and chiffon, bright red silk; not a dress, but a jumpsuit for parties, with slits running all the way from the thighs down to the ankles, tied with ribbons. The ribbons have come undone on the left leg. A fan nearby makes the thin streamers of red silk flutter around the ankle’s opening.
“It’s my left foot, isn’t it.”
“That’s right. Now you feel it, right? You lost your left foot to another world, lady. One foot here. One foot in the otherworld. In a way, you a very lucky, lady.” You feel the woman’s eyes looking at your closed lids and not ready yet to take in that strange thought, you fall asleep.
Day eight dead
(In which Miami is a mural.)
THE SCENE REPLAYS in your mind. How you told them you were once so protected. How, just a week ago, the sea glittered, reflecting a night field of stars that gathered into a singular beast that took you to shore instead of letting you be eaten alive. How instead of staying on land, you swam back to them, and hid. Swam and hid again. All of this comes out of your mouth like a slow string of bubbles as the two of them grunt and shuffle your deadened weight into their car. Beads of their perspiration spot onto your skin, and more from you pool on the plastic seating at your side. In the front seat they murmur politely, saying: “You’re okay now.” “Things will be well with you, lady.” “I know her, she’ll be fine.” When the car slows to a halt, everything in view contradicts this: the unfamiliar shack that isn’t a hospital, the two of them hobbling you towards its ramshackle veranda, your blood lighting up the whole side of the young man’s pant leg, the look of terror in the woman who stands at the door, hands covering her mouth.
“But then, somehow, the bastard got me. He got me.” The end of your story comes to you as a curiosity.
“Shhhh,” repeats the woman, whose hands reach out to receive you, and you are lighter than air suddenly at her touch, and what you anticipate as hours of hysteria are instead hours of concentration, all around your lower half.
“No man can make a shark do that, lady.”
You drift in and out of consciousness.
“Maybe you brought that shark to you.”
Why would you do that? It’s like some remarkable joke.
“And then he got me!” You yelp it out to the room.
/ / /
Unknown bedroom, high in the jungle. The space expands endlessly in all directions, like the jungle has yawned in answer to you finally opening your eyes. They’ve forgotten my head, you think. Or my face. You feel the skin of your cheekbones edge its way back towards the openings in your ears. You are listening for the bones inside yourself. Wondering how the rest of you fared through the ordeal, because you ache everywhere, as though all your parts shifted around to the wrong locations. The solidity of your bones, and how they shiver, only reminds you of the stark absence of one of your limbs. You wonder about the body which you’d only really considered skin deep. So easily, gruesomely broken. By the shark.
What otherworld? Where are you, foot?
You open your eyes to the blue ceiling, wanting to speak to the shark, to ask, “Why doesn’t it hurt? Why aren’t I dead?”
The toes and the toenail polish, the tendons and bones and skin going into the mouth of another mammal. The notion almost makes you hysterical. You feel elevated. On some level you know you’re drugged and thoughts spill out perilously. There is always one left if ever you want to measure how things are aging according to your feet, Bunny.
“I’ll always have this other foot,” you say, and laugh audibly. It draws a backdrop of women into the room. You’d forgotten about them. They’d gone quiet for hours, for your sake, wanting to let you rest. They bustle into the small room, surrounding you from head to toe.
“Hi there, lady. You must be needing some water.” A woman brushing your hair. Fans roaring up. Your eyes go to an opened window: bright swaths of palm leaves right there, practically entering the room. The oohing and ahing of a younger woman’s voice,
“Gianni Versace. That’s class.” The girl in front of you holding up a single shoe.
“Where is the other?”
“Shhhh now, lady, never mind. We know you’re a bit lost here. You told us all your story, all the trouble you been in. Where you were swimming and sleeping. You’ve been in a fever for days, but you’re okay now, the drugs help it, and the new foot’s being made right this second. You won’t believe how beautiful it is. We’re taking care of that foot. Or where it once was.” She crosses herself. You feel the air whip around her fingers. “I said it already and I’ll say it again: those shoes’ll be on you in a week, no less! I’m Thule, by the way.”
“Thank you, Thule,” is all you can manage to say. Remembering the car and the young man tying your foot up in a sweatshirt.
You can’t imagine what they’re on about, the making of a new foot. You’ll have to convince them to get you to a hospital is all. But then you remember: you have no identity cards to use in hospitals or for therapy or whatever else this kind of crisis involves.
Instead of worrying, you lap up the drugs and drink the small cups of water and soups that they bring you, and when you taste chicken in the broth it makes you happy in a very basic, futureless way. For now: just this blue house and its people, the jungle outside and the civet smell of the snake moving along the ground away from you, but then always back again to the window to watch you.
You close your eyes, comforted by the din of this extended family whose names you’ve all forgotten. Comforted by their fussing. It’s always been you who’s taken care, you who’s fussed and serve
d and made change and poured and undressed and sucked them off and wiped up afterwards and looked pretty again, no matter how tired.
/ / /
Bunny, the cigarette girl. Cheap bunny ears on a hairband, bunny tail, cufflinks like a schoolboy’s, and a bra stuffed three sizes too big. The raunch under your armpits and gathering in your underwear as you move through crowds of suits and their girlfriends. Girlfriends who sometimes befriend you but who mostly flash you looks as though to say, “I’d gladly tear your heart out.” Halfway though the shift you feel like a bad stain of electric blue moving across chintz carpets – electric blue being the colour of one of your costumes. Everything reeks of cigarettes even though you haven’t smoked your whole life. Not yet.
“It’s policy that you buy a Playboy lighter with every pack of cigarettes,” you say with your young, tinsly voice. Your long blonde hair falls over their ringed fingers and gets caught in the spokes of the tray hinged at your neck.
Bunny, the card-dealer. You quickly advanced through the Playboy rungs, from cigarette girl to casino dealer.Here’s where it got good. With the lacy white bib at your cleavage, standard issue for the girls who deal, you earned more respect from the clients. Plus you were a dash at counting cards: blackjack was easy, and throwing three decks at once didn’t phase you. No sweat. Nothing bad happened. No victim stories. None from your girlfriends either, unless they never said. The men always treated you right. The men worshipped the hourglass frame that inspired them to win thousands.
You were good that way. You brought on the lucky streaks. Like the circle of dolphins protecting you. Wheeling around you. The spin of the wheel with chips thrown in by disembodied hands. Voices cheering. Bated breath. A gasp, and a hand to a chest. Then more whirls. Red. Black. White. More cheering.
Bunny and Shark Page 7