While you are in the bathroom, the knocking has stopped and started up again. You open the bathroom door. You walk across the kitchen floor. You place your hand on the cold round doorknob. You feel nothing, except for that. You know who it is. You know what you look like, to him. You can see yourself, framed in the doorway, impassive stare, the impasse is a truly unique confluence of expectation and hopelessness. Your hair in waves lets on nothing. Your black sweater says you are operating on the level of functionality. Certain things will function, like sleep, but there are ulterior motives, and he will see that. He will see you have been sleeping to get away.
When your husband shows up at your door, you have a choice to make.
You were not the type of girl one married. You thought you had made sure of that. Or, you were the type of girl who got married at nineteen. You are not so sure.
You open the door.
Hi, you say. You smile then. You are not supposed to, but seeing him makes you happy, and that feels simple, and you will take simplicity when it is offered like that.
What is not simple is the relief you feel, not in your head, but your body. You are able to change relief to antagonism if it is in your head, transform it into something more useful, something that shields, but with your body, you know less how to control.
*
There is the closing scene, a dinner, when I finally met her:
Last night, things turned. I guess, to put it concisely, succinctly, it was her turn. Dinner happened. I can describe it, but I don’t even want to, it feels too brightly like wet paint, an open still-pulsing wound, blood is still coming out, turning things red. It’s a pity. It’s a shame. It’s all of those things, that are petty and small, that I will turn petty and small, to belittle them, to deny them importance. Let’s just say it was like watching the slaughter of a caged animal, from far away. Let’s just say, I was getting farther and farther away, whether it was they who were receding, or I who was receding.
We sat at the square table, one person at each side. All squares are equilaterals but not all equilaterals are squares. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. There was some sort of pithy logic to it, that always to me felt like fighting through hanging vines for a clearing, pulling apart interlocking strands of greenery, ripping apart grasping tendrils, rupturing ties. Just to get to what, to where.
Before, I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t predicted losing, because the walls of the enclosure were so far away, and far apart. They weren’t even touching each other. There were no vertices, no corners, only four straight lines. I didn’t notice their approach. My sister will betray my trust like that, without even calling it betrayal. This is life, she insists.
And now, we sat at the square table, and Helen’s voice was not low and scrapey and wise like I imagined, but poured forth words like cream, like polished crystal gems, each sentence baubling against the last and next like the sound of sophisticated glass.
Let’s just say, I wanted to shoot myself, repeatedly. Let’s just say, sure, tell me the story of your lives, and the story of your love, and, well, don’t expect me to not shoot myself, repeatedly.
What was the worst, was her laugh. In my imaginings, I had allowed her to laugh, but I hadn’t made predictions about it, I hadn’t imagined it with the sound on.
*
She was always at home, alone. Me, too, though; I am also at home, alone:
I open the door from my bedroom to the kitchen. The air in the rest of the apartment is cooler, faster, it moves as if there is life, as if it is filled with plants, transpiring, respiring, breathing in and out, in and out, chlorophyll pulsating in veins, pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. The kitchen and living room are dim, the curtains on the far side of the wall behind the couches sway silently.
The kitchen counter around the sink is cluttered with wares of all types, clattered against each other in a still life. Balanced plates, mugs, saucers, spoons, glass plates stacked unevenly. There is a bag of bread sitting diagonally, cross-sectioning the bottom left corner of the sink. There is a ghost white cutting board, on which lies one red bell pepper.
The bell pepper is helpless on its side. Several slivers have already been gouged from it. These red strips are piled neatly toward the top left of the cutting board, like logs.
My mother used to comment on my reticence, would remark that I held onto my words as if they were gold. Which seemed to be less a comment on material greed than on my general unwillingness to let go of something thought of as a precious commodity.
I have become very good at not saying anything, for prolonged periods of time.
All of my heroes have been leavers.
But I see that the rest of the bell pepper lolls there, balanced on the fulcrum of a rounded edge. The dim morning light glosses a slight creamy sheen on one bulbous side surface. It flounders, wonders where the rest of its body has gone. I’m on fire, the pepper whispers, quietly. A six-inch valley has been cut, the hissing of skin and flesh being sliced in one long, whispering motion.
So I step quietly across the warm stone floors toward the pepper. The tiles feel soft, in this silence and heat. If the room is turning into a forest, I think I may be slowly sinking with each step, down, into the fecund black soil of the forest floor, a loosely moist filling of roots and leaves, detritus and insect bodies, wings and feet and stick-like ribbed abdomens.
*
In the light of morning, I wake up and turn onto my side. I raise my right arm into the air of the forest, wiggle my fingers, flex them open. My hand feels slightly numb. My right jaw aches, and turning my wrist, I see the rich teeming brown of the soft soil beneath me.
It sounds like nothing. It sounds like nothing. It is nothing.
I see a red mark on my forearm, not a cut, nothing breaking through skin, but a long red mark, and a small bruise-colored mark below it, like an exclamation point. ! Yes. ! You did it! Go! Wow!
Sometimes, my heart beats faster, and I don’t want it to. Sometimes, I think, I’m trying, I’m trying to grow, and be a better person, and progress, and evolve, and figure things out, and fix things that I’ve broken along the way.
I pull my eyelids down, for a moment, like a test. Can you do it. Do this. Do this, at this speed. I continue to rotate my wrist, hand up in the air. Cracking. Sometimes my arms are made of knives, sometimes of feathers. I warm them up, until there is no more cracking. Only the faintest high-pitched flit of a solid surface cutting through the air.
Ghosts
Ghost #1
We called her the Early Twenties Girl Ghost. She was in her early twenties, not from the 1920s. I was working late alone in the lofted office. The back door of the building clicked metallically open and closed, and a few seconds later, through the spaces between the beams of the guardrail, I saw her walk the length of the northern half of the downstairs space from where I sat. I saw her from the back. I had not yelled out hello when the door first opened, and I could not yell hello now. She disappeared into the corridor that led to the storefront, which was locked up for the night. I sat for a moment longer, my hands paralyzed in home row position over my keyboard. I clenched my teeth experimentally. I rolled my eyeballs around in their sockets. I was resolving, or was I dissolving. I stepped carefully across the office, and went downstairs. I retraced her steps. I was following the footsteps of a ghost and I didn’t even know it. Or I knew it, but didn’t want to admit it. I went through the corridor. I pushed aside the plastic curtain. Hello, I finally ventured. But she was a ghost. There was no body to be found.
Ghost #2
We called it the Phantom of the Bathroom. The restaurant had just closed, the final diners had just left. We were doing closing work. I went to check on the bathroom, a one-room ordeal in the back near the ice machine. There was a Chinese restaurant we used to go to a lot, called Pavilions. It was shaped like a pag
oda, like a huge fat white pagoda like a big block of tofu. The bathroom in Pavilions was in the back, down a corridor. In one corner near the entrance of the corridor was a vending machine selling cigarettes. I liked looking at the buttons, each button had on it a different miniature image of a carton of cigarettes. I liked miniature things. I liked the idea of things getting smaller and smaller, but not disappearing.
This Chinese restaurant was not like Pavilions. But someday I would be remembering it. I did not like to think of that, because you only remember things if they’ve gone away. Or if you yourself have gone away.
This Chinese restaurant had a smooth brass peacock-shaped coat hook on the back of the bathroom door that I coveted. I looked at it whenever I was in the bathroom. I was planning on looking at it then, when I was checking on the bathroom. I turned the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn, because it was locked. I turned it again. I knocked. Hello? I said. I did not hesitate to say hello then, I was racing to finish my closing work. Is anyone there, I said to the door, knocking on it again. I went to go find Candy who was reconciling receipts behind the bar at the front of the restaurant. Everyone is gone, right? I asked. She nodded. No, I said. But the bathroom’s locked. I don’t know if someone is in there. I mean, I think maybe there’s nobody in there. I think maybe it got accidentally locked from the inside. That’s what I said, even though it doesn’t make sense. It was locked from the outside, with nobody inside, accidentally. She shrugged. She was worried about failing her Italian class, because then she wouldn’t be able to do her summer study abroad in Milan. I went to look for Jake. Hey, the bathroom’s locked from the inside, I said. Do you know where the key is, how do we get it open? There’s a key in the desk downstairs in the office, he said. But the office door is locked and Bo is the only one with the key and he just left. Ugh, I said. I went to go find a knife in the drawer by the tea station. I wiggled the tip of the knife around in the keyhole in the middle of the doorknob. I jiggled the doorknob at the same time, with my left hand. It still wouldn’t open. Jake, I called over my shoulder. I jiggled the knife again, and then the doorknob turned, and I pushed open the door but it immediately hit—softly but forcefully—someone right inside the door OH I exclaimed as the door slammed shut again OH shit sorry I didn’t mean—, I exclaimed in shock. Jake arrived then. What are you doing, he said rolling his eyes. I was shaking. From what I’m not sure. No, no, there’s someone in there, there IS someone in there, I said. I didn’t know what I was saying, but there you go. Jake reached over and turned the doorknob and opened the door. But there was nobody inside. I felt it, I felt the door hit a body, I was telling Candy up at the front. She turned on the soundtrack from The Phantom of the Opera then, the music swelling up to fill every possible space.
Ghost #3
I thought of her as the Hotel Water Tower Ghost. I watched as she walked into the hotel. I watched as she stopped at the front counter, and then followed as she paused by the elevators, and then seemingly changed her mind, and walked up the stairs instead. Once inside her room, she seemed lost, unsure of what to do, or what she should be doing, or perhaps unsure of something she had already decided, something she had already put into motion. She walked around the room for a while, looking at things, touching things, picking things up and putting them back down. She ate a sandwich outside, she looked up at the building, at the sky, even up at the roof, it seems. I imagine that her gaze lingered on the roof, but perhaps I project that lingering in hindsight, knowing that the roof would be where her body ended. She went back into her room, and she sat down on the bed and wrote in her notebook for a while. I watched her as she wrote. I read over her shoulder. Unremarkable observations, perhaps belying some deeper guilt or fear, something darker. She didn’t seem to be in the right place, there in that hotel, with her glasses and her ponytail, her hooded college sweatshirt and jeans, her backpack. A lot of people in that hotel are lonely, but she, she didn’t seem to be in the right place.
*
I have never been in a hotel like this before. There was nobody at the front desk when I walked through the entrance last night. A bell hanging from a string on the door. There was something muffled about my room. I put my backpack down on the chair next to the window. Outside, it was dark, a few people walked on the street below—they looked slow, and aimless, like they had nowhere important to be. The high wail of sirens coming closer and then getting farther away. I unzipped my backback and pulled my sandwich out. After the siren, the room became very quiet. Every sound I heard was smooth like bubbles. Voices from people, or from a TV, or a radio. Space sounds, buzzing, or humming, from machinery. I turned on the bathroom light. I turned it off. I picked up my room key from the nightstand, and walked out to the balcony that wrapped around the building. I ate my sandwich while I leaned against the railing. I thought about calling Mom. I thought about calling someone. Just so I could hear someone familiar talking, and then hear the pause, and then hear my own voice responding. Talking about nothing. I looked up and down the hallway. Every room door was the same. All painted the same peach color. I pressed my fingers against the sharp bumps of the stucco wall. Leaning back against the railing, I looked up at the next floor of rooms. Rows and rows of shut doors. I could not imagine what might be happening behind those closed doors. At some point, I think, there are too many possibilities, for what people could be doing. There was a metal ladder at the far end of the building, for access onto the roof. I could see the edges of things that were on the roof, walled-off rectangular structures, a utility room, something with engines, turbines, water, wires, electricity.
*
“The notebook that was found among the victim’s belongings was blank except for the first four pages. The first page contained a list of names and phone numbers, all confirmed to be members of the victim’s immediate family, friends, or classmates. The other three pages have the appearance of handwritten diary entries, and are dated the night of the homicide. These entries consist predominantly of the victim’s observations of the hotel, and record her actions upon entering the room, and then as she exits the room to the exterior balcony. Apart from the recollection of a childhood memory in another hotel, the contents of the notebook provide little insight into the victim’s background, and give no concrete indication of her intentions for the night, nor any knowledge or foresight of an encounter with the perpetrator.”
Ghost #4
I called him the Ghost Dude. He wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t invisible, but he was very pale, and he always looked like he was doing some serious soul-searching when he looked at me while we were having sex. I wasn’t sure what he was planning on doing, if he should really end up finding my soul or his own soul in the depths of my face while his penis was heaving itself in and out of my vagina. But I was sure that I didn’t have it in me, to allow it to happen, so I closed my eyes, or I leaned over or turned around or stuffed my face into the bed or a pillow. Look at me, he would say, and I would do the opposite. I looked out the window, there was a field outside that window by his bed, which later, after when we weren’t having sex anymore, a bunch of us would be playing bocce ball in that field, and I would get hundreds of mosquito bites, which had never been a concern for me at all, and from that point onward, I would always get hundreds of mosquito bites, wherever I went. Once, we had sex on his wool couch while Over the Top, that Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling movie, played on his huge screen. I had wished for his body to be invisible, so that I could watch the movie. Don’t you want to touch me, he had asked me the first time we had sex, because I had let him touch me, but somehow could not find it within me the desire to touch him back. With some people, you win, every point of contact is a fucking wonder, you have never loved such skin, such flesh. With the Ghost Dude, I closed my eyes and still I saw his eyes, wide and guileless, probing into mine. What do you call someone who makes you want to become invisible? It was possible, I knew, because it had happened to me once before, with some people, to
feel as if each time you were looked at, you yourself had become a new way of seeing. Would you like to be made and remade each time someone looked at you?
I did, once. Before I ever saw any ghosts.
But back to Ghost Dude. His eyes searched in mine, as if he were a ghost looking for a host body to inhabit. Longing. I shied. I had found him, in my community college Spanish class, which I was taking for professional development. He was the sous chef at a local restaurant, and was trying to supplement his kitchen Spanish with some textbook basics. He looked for me, even as he looked at me. I got a rug burn from having sex on his wool couch. He was from North Dakota, where perhaps wool couches made sense; here in L.A., I dreamed of destroying that wool couch, with a medieval axe.
Ghost #5
It didn’t take so long to become a Secret Ghost. I canceled on everything. I stopped responding. I didn’t make a sound. Not a wind. There was no sheerness, no faint outline. Not even a wisp. Even back when I was solid and stubbornly obstructive, I used to sit very still sometimes, in moments of pain. I could picture in vivid glistening blood red, the ripping out of my heart, after each one of my three heartbreaks, like in that movie when the possessed boy-king sticks his hand straight into that guy’s chest and pulls out a fistful of still-beating pulp, handful of heart. I was used to responding to emotional havoc by staying perfectly motionless, breath illegible.
All Roads Lead to Blood Page 14