We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  “Oooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh. What do you want me to do now?” The voice on the other end of the line never waits for answers.

  Shea whispers, “There are two of us now.” Soma steps sideways and bumps into Shea slightly and, as she does, she dips her middle and index fingers into Shea’s back pocket, grips the credit card firmly, pulls it out in one quick gesture, and slips it into her pocket, then sighs dramatically, “Oh yeeaaaaaaaaaaah uggghhhhhhh,” while Shea bends, tries not to laugh.

  Months later, when one of the other girls rats the group out to her mom, Soma will hear her dad shout into the phone, “Didn’t anyone at this goddamn porn company notice they were talking to goddamn children?” No, the numbers from the credit card are the password to a parallel realm, a realm in which, when she opens her eyes, the people begin to move, and when she closes her eyes, they stop. Now that Soma has crossed, she knows she won’t be back.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, holding Shea’s father’s credit card, Soma dials the 1-800 number for the light machine. Not a woman, but a silken male robot voice intones: Thank you for contacting our purchasing centre. Someone will be with you soon to assist you with your request. Piano music segues into a litany of solutions: hair-growth cream, knives that never need to be sharpened, a fish tank that cleans itself. Soma feels a stirring of doubt in her belly. These things sound cheap, not quite right. Her mother’s word—tacky. Then the piano music jolts silent, there’s a tone like an elevator opening, and a voice squeaks, with a thick accent, “How can I help you?”

  “Hi. I’d like to buy the machine, that machine for—for light?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The lamp. The big lamp.”

  Rustling. “Can you give me the full product name, please?”

  “Um. The machine for people who can’t deal with things without the sun?”

  “The seasonal affective disorder treatment lamp. SAD lamp.”

  “I, um, I have a credit card.”

  “What’s your age?”

  “I am twenty-three years old.”

  A long pause. Breaths piped in, like the worker is an astronaut sitting on a picnic chair on Neptune.

  “Visa, MasterCard, or American Express?”

  Frantically, Soma examines the card. “Visa.” She says her home address. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when the machine arrives, but there is no other address to give. It’s the only address she knows by heart, the only address she has ever memorized.

  At the end, she says thank you, goodbye, and when she puts the phone down, she is full of dizziness, a swampy buzz and shimmering through her, that she has done something solid, something good, something she can hold to her chest.

  A secret: sometimes, lately, she leaves the house and goes for long walks at night on her own.

  Walking, she closes her eyes. A man drifts at an alley’s mouth. Soma opens her eyes. The man is gone. The alley took him in. It isn’t raining tonight. The water level on her map is dropping. People bob. People swim to the surface on clear days and sun their skins, they flap their arms like ducks, they preen and compare their fins in the gusts of fresh yellow air. A bus swims past her, groans its air brakes, its myopic whale eyes move through her and away, into the swift current of the street. The gutters spit water and pulpy light. Fish dagger the corners of her eyes. She shuts them. Her lungs are bags of fluorescence that bulge when her feet hit the pavement. She is only light and water, emptying, spreading. Through the shutters of her eyes, she sees the people on the sidewalk lift, she watches their fins unfurl, and she keeps her eyes open as they soar above her toward the surface of the city.

  The crows anchor the wires, bearing down the weight of the city, its lopsided net, and she staggers forward and then runs, feet picking out the lines, darting away from the patterns, step on a crack and break your mother’s back. Kids chanted that, they hopped and jumped forward and sometimes they fell and then they all went home. Step on a crack step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back.

  She can see them, streaming from the rooftops and windows, all the people in fins. They bend their knees and launch. Their bodies heave upward on the tide, move gently with breaststrokes and small kicks across the arched roof of the street. Each one has a headlamp. They move their arms together, spreading out like a school of fish in luminous synchrony.

  It starts to rain. The air rubs its glands against her cheeks.

  Shea is waiting for her by the phone with a group of girls. When she took the credit card, Soma didn’t think through how this would mean an interruption in the phone calls in the stairwell. Then, when she realized, she couldn’t not show up to the phone—that would be a dead giveaway that she was the one who took the card.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You were the only one there.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  She’s sweating under the bathing suit she wears under her clothes every day now. The bathing suit’s material makes her feel lightweight, slippery. Right now, at this moment, she’s hot and the bathing suit feels rigid, a suit of armour fused with her skin.

  “I am going to have you arrested. For stealing.”

  Shea’s tone is so imperious, so powerful, that Soma expects police to storm the stairwell, force her down in their black uniforms.

  The credit card is in the top right-hand drawer of her desk at home, the map of the underwater city folded around it.

  “You stole it.”

  “What?” Shea takes a step forward.

  “You stole it first. From your father.” Soma is surprised by her own voice – so loud, so even. I’ll kill you, she had screamed at her mother.

  The circle of girl faces behind Shea goes black. Then a couple girls nod.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Whatever,” Soma says majestically.

  “You can’t come here anymore.”

  The thought of not being able to come to listen to the woman on the other end of the line is a small hard axe on the small hollow at the base of her belly. Lately, she has been wondering where she would go if she left home. How do people disappear? Where do people go? But she could never leave her brother.

  “You can’t even call her anymore without the card.”

  Shea, throat unlocked: “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, how did you know I was talking about the card?” Her voice, without its restraint, is something desperate and grasping. Her face looks ugly, too.

  Soma turns and runs. Behind her, sounds of a stampede. High breaths like birds screaming in their sleep.

  Her face where a scarlet bruise will boom, against the cold floor. Her arms wrenched behind her back and her skin slipping off—no, just her shirt. Wetness on her arm. A feeling like a tongue, but rougher, a mild scraping. She struggles to free herself and cannot. Her mother’s face rages in her mind. Panting, freed, she curls into herself.

  Everyone is gone. The fluorescent light examines her arm. A tattoo, permanent marker, the smell antiseptic, a fish-tank smell. Written on the inside of her forearm: PROPERTY OF SHEA. It will take weeks to fade.

  Another rush of feet, and she slips her arm under her bare belly. Male voices. She’s outside the gym.

  A man’s voice. “What in the hell? Oh my god. Stay back, boys.”

  In the school nurse’s office, because she refuses to speak, she is placed in a back room the size of her kitchen cupboard at home. A nurse comes in and helps her swallow a paper cone of water. Asks what else she needs. Soma holds out her arm. The nurse returns with a length of bandage and winds it around the crooked black letters. “Shea did this?” she asks. Soma rolls away from her, wipes the two sides of her face on the wall. The bandage has taken away the burning on her skin. She hears the nurse leave. Who is she, another stranger, another open face, a window, or a just-bloomed flowe
r, blank and passing?

  Her father meets with the nurse and an older teacher Soma has never met before, a man with white hair and an old purple sweater. Soma watches them talk outside, a small circle of people, through the window.

  In the car, her father drives a block, then pulls over.

  “Soma, do you know anything about a package coming to our house?”

  Soma shakes her head.

  “A big box with something from the internet?”

  Her light machine. It’s here.

  Where’s Mom?”

  “At Jenny’s.”

  “Where’s Josiah?”

  “At his friend’s.”

  “Lucan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  Her father shakes his head, startled. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “For how long?”

  “What? He lives—he lives with us.”

  “Do you live with me?” Her ears are ringing.

  “Yes.” He sighs.

  “Is Mom coming back?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Next week.”

  “For sure?”

  “Yes.” Her father turns the heat on in the car. “Yes.” He stares at her carefully. “I’m going to be travelling less for a while.”

  Her father turns the key in the ignition, and they begin to move slowly through the downpour. Water surrounds them.

  “That nurse said your body was covered with bruises.”

  “Yeah, well that’s why they called you.”

  “The nurse said that the bruises were new and old.”

  In the silence that follows, Soma looks at her father, his hands on the wheel, the sinkholes in his cheeks, his eyes glassy.

  What if her mother never came back? For a moment, she allows herself to relax into the relief of this thought. Through his window, she can see a diver, padding furiously upward toward the sky. The clouds are dark, heavy with swimmers.

  When they get to the house, Soma runs inside ahead of her father and takes the box from the kitchen table. It’s much heavier than she expected. Her father offers to help her carry it and she lurches away, barely makes it to her bed before it slides from her arms. She gouges the plastic tape with a pen until she can shred it off with her fingertips. The light machine is packed in styrofoam pellets that she digs frantically through until her fingertips hit something solid, plastic. She runs around turning off all the lights in her room and pulls the curtains down. Her room is dim and quiet. When she unplugs her normal lamp, her hands are slippery with sweat, and she wipes them on her pants.

  She plugs in the light machine, hugs the white cube close to her body. You are mine. Its broad, white-grey face flashes, before a strange, blue light startles her eyes and moves through her. The world vanishes, burned away. She closes her eyes. Opens them.

  Her eyes shine.

  change your life today

  change your life today

  A Brief History of Eye Contact

  Iris

  You know what this is and so do I. Saying this thick with teenage flavour. Lyrics from softrock stations for brokeback commuters. Before these words are something too much or something expected. Public school battleship linoleum. Cubism of regulation issue windows, doors, windows. Breaks in the basketball practice massacre sounds in the gym at the end of the hall. Double doors, cigarette smoke in atmospheric rings. Hung in a young lung. In your basement, TV pickles faces, computer speakers scream tinny desire. Clothes off. Sitcom family kitchen manners, stuffed baked potatoes with their jackets off, a pile of warm stones in the centre of the table weighing soft pocket of your stomach down. Pass her like you have things, large elsewhere plans. DNA sketched in the light radial piping around the pupils. Breath-hold walk into your own mouth-warmed air. Jingle and music smash of boys and girls leaning into the chain-link fence and bus fare in your endless daily pocket. The row of sun-held second-floor windows. But you aren’t a boy are you boy oh boy oh boy. Your hips clobber quick turns. They recognize you by your shyness, your visible teeth. You aim your eyes on the spot beyond the bend in the hallway, the spot above the other person’s shoulder, the steady speck on the wall. You avoid eye contact like a dancer learning to spin. With little effort, you can be invisible. Where are you going so fast?

  Sclera, the white of the eye

  Shame is a kind of magical thinking, Everybody in this school knows what you are feeling, everybody in this building knows what you are wanting, there is a conspiracy in the water supply your fantasies circulate with wings and indexed search terms everybody has a mimeograph of your first encounter your last dream your most recent browser history your skin has a visible bruise of every social brushstroke, for years you are blank a drifting transparency, you are a fresh street of morning glory you are a body projected onto the sky rainblasted billboard outside the town where your relatives live your guardian angel stole the photograph from your wallet last night eye contact is a portal with no record of crossing your stories were smuggled in a backpack to the beach where your ancestors were burned your incorrect face is tattooed on the palm of everyone you have ever wanted to fuck everybody reading this holds a record of your body’s pale humiliations this paragraph has stretchmarks is badly juiced muscles bowlegged but only when lying on your back knees apart but really none of it happened it was thinking flying down to earth. Until the day someone looks you in the eye.

  Cornea

  This is the year you begin to pay attention to bodies. There is a body you fit against, horizon, but also road. A space you slip through. A short hard barrier you curl against. You turn sideways and fall through the spaces in the changing of the guard. There is an interior chamber, holding light, refracting motives and elbows. Is there a way to be selectively neutral? Eye contact is a stream of alternate running storylines. You look for it, in the rescuing mercies of taxi cabs, in slagheaps of discarded magazines, in city hymnals. Habitat drift. Charisma is punctuation between the middle lovers. You can’t hold a storyline, refract friendships like light passing through your swelling bent prism lens. Someone tells you, “You don’t have to act like that, I already saw last night’s episode on HBO.” Nights rearrange plot and margin. You grow a body to fit every pairing. You are part human chandelier, part drag A&E biography, you are a chorus of labouring RSS feeds, and when you lay your hands down on a naked chest it is skin graft on candle-hot MacBook. In the coastal monsoon winter you fall asleep every night watching the same characters, walk through the sets in your dreams. Someone tells you, “People are limited,” but you aren’t ready to believe yet. If you look too closely, you’ll give yourself away. When she takes her hand out of you, that warm space there, like losing your first tooth.

  Pupil

  Someone tells you, “Every time I think about all the furniture I lost to that breakup I just feel so angry.” And you laugh. You are a small space that time pours through as you walk backwards slowly toward the ocean. Your friends are tables and chairs crabwalking the breastplate of the continent. University is over, temporarily, for some. This relationship is on credit and I prenup my favourite sushi place grown-up pillows with feathered career plans and “oh him he’s leaving town soon so I can tell he’s fucking to a deadline.” Love is a reason to move to a different city. Slowly your city becomes a graveyard of glass towers. A friend looks directly into your eyes for two years, then closes his eyes permanently. You guard the tiny portholes you carry around, eyes heavy as goggles. Dailiness is a white clay bowl you fill with bus transfers, proof of movement. The furniture crabwalks back across the Rockies, takes a long time, splashes into the Pacific. Float on your back, staring at the moon with its daytime manicure, its regimen of stars. Waves lift and drop the bodies and plans and botched partnerships and the tables and chairs moan, “It wasn’t supposed to
be this way.” You have learned to look at eyes and not be looked through. High heels scissor you, slay you plainly, you have outsmarted climaxes by making yourself identical to the weather. A season later, you have outsmarted nothing. You should have disappeared long ago. You siphon the newness of faces through your long black straw, dark point in your contemplation where all light enters. You want to be more than a body changing hands.

  Retina

  You say: I will change for you but instead you only change. Non-adaptive traits include: avatar reliance, radio silence, sentences that sit cross-legged under the sheets. Your eye has shed its sheer glistening jacket. Inside you there is a rough screen and a shuddering nerve coming to life, cascading words. Pacing is what you were learning, walking to this. A body walks through the screen, trailing tendrils. Last things bring back the first, boys and girls marched along the borders, song lyrics doing celestial matchwork, your fumbling paws, your snakeskin that peeled back from your face like a cap in spring rains, a city underwater struggling against its own drowning. When you meet your match two chameleons melt into each other. Are you out there or in here? Both and more. People are people are people. You hold my sentences in the dark. Look me in the eye.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the journals and anthologies that published these pieces along the way in current and earlier versions: Plenitude (thank you, Andrea Routley), Lemon Hound (thank you, Sina Queyras), Prairie Fire (thank you, Andris Taskans), Word and Colour (thank you, Leah Mol), Granta (thank you, Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux and the UK editors), The Rusty Toque and the 2016 edition of The Journey Prize Anthology, with special thanks to Kathryn Mockler and The Rusty Toque, for nominating me for that award. Thank you to Adrienne Gruber for reading much of this work over the years and being such an encouraging, warm presence for my writing. Thank you to Madeleine Thien for encouraging me to expand an abandoned short story that then grew into the novella “Who You Start With Is Who You Finish With.” Thank you to the many writers in and around Vancouver who have invited me to read my work, eaten with me, and listened to me complain about “the process” over the years I wrote this book, especially Leah Horlick, Amber Dawn, Amy Fung, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Lucas Crawford. Thank you to Jesse Marchard and Liz Cave for friendship. Thank you most to Lorraine Weir, with love, for years of care and shared imagination.