by Schow, Ryan
Then he heard it: the familiar snapping of a shutter.
The pop of a flashbulb.
He looked to the right and there she was: a young brunette with un-styled hair and bargain store jeans hunched in a photographer’s stance just outside the fenced-in line of the restaurant’s patio area. Her camera bag was slung over her shoulder, camera pressed to her face. Maybe she was twenty-five. Maybe she was thirty.
Pop. A flash. Click. The opening and closing of the shutter.
She looked up at him over her camera and it did something to him. Stirred a familiar resentment. There was only a decorative iron fence between them. He forced a smile because that’s what you do when you’re having strangers take your picture. He hated himself for doing that. For being forced to do that.
Pop.
Click.
She lowered the camera from her face completely and looked at him. Her face bore not an ounce of expression. To her he was not a person but a paycheck. Rent. The exasperation of feeling reduced to a piece of paper with numbers on it—a check—was so dehumanizing he turned away.
She’s just a girl doing her job, he reminded himself.
Christian expected Margaret to be making the most of this unfortunate paparazzi moment, but it was clear she wasn’t. She was pretending not to notice.
This is new as well, he thought.
“You’re being photographed,” he told her.
“I’m over that,” she replied with the wave of a bejeweled hand.
“What are you into these days?”
“Self-improvement,” she said. Margaret reclined in her chair, tilted her face into the lofty breeze slipping its way through the courtyard.
“Self-improvement is masturbation,” he said casually, as if having given the subject no thought at all. It was his favorite line from Fight Club.
Abby told him the other day that if he hadn’t seen Fight Club, he had not truly lived. After she left, after Rebecca was kidnapped, Fight Club was all he watched. He’d seen it five times already and now he was reading the book.
“Ha!” Margaret laughed. “Really?”
“Really,” he said with a grin. Behind him, the camera was snapping, the flashbulb popping. He fought to ignore the girl. The thing about the paparazzi was, they were always fishing for something: a stolen kiss, a salacious new love, old flames reuniting, a slipped nipple, or that all-valuable topless-on-the-balcony or beach picture.
What was this girl looking for? He would give her nothing. The fact that he had to even think like this set his teeth on edge. He hated his privacy being invaded. Especially when he was going to such lengths to preserve it.
2
He and Margaret made small talk until their salads arrived, and it was surprising how much their conversation was nothing like the conversation they had as a married couple (even though technically they weren’t yet divorced). He looked at her, laughed with her, talked with her about Abby and the young woman she was becoming, and though there existed the familiarity and beauty he’d come to appreciate about her, there was also something else: disdain, resentment, hysteria.
Plus that damn photographer was still at it. Still snapping pictures. Still waiting for that one big embarrassment. That one picture.
Her big payday.
Finally, after they finished their salads—before they got their pasta—Christian gathered up the courage to say what he had been thinking ever since his home was invaded, Rebecca was abducted and Abby ran off to Netty’s. “Have you ever thought of having the procedure?”
“I’ve had plenty of procedures.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, referring to the one he and Abby had.
“No.”
“It never entered your mind?”
“What? So all of this”—she said, waving her hand across her face and breasts—“was all for nothing? I worked hard to get here. And I’m not about to let it all melt away for some experimental face and body. No offense.”
“Do you ever want to have a good relationship with Abby?”
“I don’t need one of your makeovers to do that.”
“She doesn’t like you, Margaret. It’s not because of who you are. It’s because your timing is all wrong. You’re trying to be her mother, I know, but your efforts are coinciding with her transformation, and it looks an awful lot like you’re only trying because she’s all the sudden skinny and beautiful.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
Inside, his temperature climbed. This was not the way he saw their luncheon playing out. “I was never good at reading your mind,” he said, much of his smile falling from his eyes.
“That was always a shame,” she teased, her heart clearly not into it because she knew the fight as well as he did.
He thought about the conversation, where it was going, and if he wanted to spoil a perfectly good afternoon dredging up the past or not. To hell with it, he thought.
“Plus, all the things you said to her as a child, the way you approached her about her weight, the paparazzi, her other physical…shortcomings, it left a sour taste on her brain.”
Pop. Snap.
“I know,” Margaret said, her eyes flashing to the paparazzi girl.
Christian could tell she was trying not to cry. Still quick to tears, he thought. Like mother like daughter.
“I was only trying to help,” she said.
“She missed the message.”
Lowering her eyes, blinking fast, she said, “I know.”
Pop.
Snap.
“What it looked like to her was that she wasn’t good enough, she wouldn’t ever be good enough, and that you were ashamed of her, embarrassed.” Saying these things, he found his temper unraveling.
Pop.
Snap.
Pop.
Snap, snap, snap.
To her credit, she said, “I know this makes me a bad person, a terrible person, but all those things you just said, that’s exactly how I felt.”
Pop.
Snap.
That anxious, restless feeling building in him ever since he saw the girl on the other side of the decorative iron fence, it boiled and expanded within him until he couldn’t take it. Like an atom bomb, he felt himself exploding in slow motion.
He was thinking how this was a private moment between two people who loved each other, who hated each other, who needed understanding, honesty, closure, and this freaking bitch with a camera was shitting all over it.
Margaret just made the most damning admission a mother could make, and inside, his mind was disintegrating into rage. This should’ve been a healing moment between him and Margaret. She finally told the truth.
Pop.
Snap.
Margaret started to say something, but Christian stood up fast, grabbed a half eaten plate of penne pasta on the vacated table between him and the camera woman, then charged the fence-line where she stood and slung the entire mess of uneaten food into the woman’s face. She startled as if he threw ice water in her face. Or a hot fecal pie.
“Give us some goddamn privacy!” he snarled.
The woman just stood there, speechless. Mouth open like it was trying to draw flies. The bomb went off and now remorse set in. Seeing her face dripping with meat sauce and noodles, Christian felt a little bad inside, the emotion like a spark of light on the darkest of nights.
“You…threw…pasta on me!” the girl said, flabbergasted. Her voice was like she had been hard on her lungs all her life. Like she was a young drinker working hard to hit bottom.
“I’m trying to have a private moment with my…friend, and you’re ruining it for what? A few bucks and a page nine blurb?”
She checked her camera, then pawed the pasta off her face. “Try five hundred, you pretentious asshole.”
Christian pulled out his wallet, withdrew a thousand dollars in hundreds and said, “I’ll buy that film and I’ll pay you for your humiliation.”
“I don’t want your money!” she barked,
slapping his outstretched hand and its wad of bills away. Up close, she had crow’s feet and pronounced frown lines. Her skin looked a little dry and her eyes had a certain dullness to them. She was not as young as he thought. But she was every bit as jaded.
He felt sorry for her.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted painfully, more solemn.
“I could sue you, you know.”
Her shirt looked ruined.
“Take the money,” he said, handing it at her again. She shook her head, put up a hand that told him to stop. “Suit yourself.”
He returned to the table only to realize how much of a scene he made. Everyone was looking at him and it was worse than being photographed.
“If it’s any consolation,” he said to Margaret, who looked either amused or horrified, he couldn’t quite tell, “I’m feeling a bit embarrassed.”
Margaret finally laughed and he felt better. “The old you would never have been so impulsive, or rude,” she said. “I think I like version two of you.”
“Yes, well I’ve wanted the truth from you for years and now you lay it out on the table and—just like before—our horrified expressions are being immortalized for some bush league gossip rag.”
“Who cares?”
“We used to care. Abby used to care. The paparazzi ruined our daughter’s life. They ruined our life.”
Understanding passed like ghosts through Margaret’s eyes.
Leaning forward, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he said, “You’re the last piece of our past, the last witness to what became an unsavory life. If you stay this way—your looks I mean—then we can’t safely exist as a family together. Even a dysfunctional one. But if we can erase you, we can completely erase the past. We can start fresh, Margaret. We can be a family again.”
“I don’t want to be erased,” she whispered back, real panic setting in her eyes.
“Sometimes, in order to find ourselves—to save ourselves—we must just disappear ourselves. Margaret, sweetheart, love of my life, my savior, my Satan, mother of my child, it’s time to disappear yourself. You have to save yourself from yourself.”
Right then—as their food was arriving, as the paparazzi opportunist was leaving, as Christian’s insistent eyes burrowed soul-deep into her—Margaret finally broke into tears.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Yes,” he said, taking her hand gently into his, his voice tender, reassuring. “Disappear yourself already. It will be okay. We’ll figure this thing out together. As a family.”
Oxygen Eating Fairy of Mass Destruction
1
Georgia sat Indian-style on the carpeted floor in her parents’ living room. She was alone and staring at her mother’s nine foot tall plant, a monstera deliciosa. The plant’s huge, leathery leaves were heart shaped and slotted, almost like green knives brought together around a lighter green stem to form this gorgeous, awe inspiring tropical plant.
Her parents brought it back from their trip to Mexico several years ago, and they treated it like offspring. Watering it. Fertilizing it. Baby-talking to it.
Like it knew human words and it was their love and undivided attention that made the bizarre thing grow. Georgia was always envious of the plant.
She always hated it.
Her flat-chested mother came into the room with something in her hand. A silver ring. She knelt down next to Georgia and said, “Here sweetie, this was yours. It was taken off before the…procedure.”
Georgia looked at it. It took a moment, but the meaning of the ring crept slowly back into her slightly hazy mind. It was her dead brother’s ring. Before he died, he wore it on his middle finger. The inscription inside the ring, Life at all Costs, was how he wanted to live his life.
By that time, their mother had had both her breasts removed. Not because they both needed it, but because only one needed it and no self-respecting woman wanted grossly mismatched tits.
After her brother died, Georgia asked her mother if she was going to have new breasts and her mother said, “Why? So I can be reminded of how much better the originals looked?”
Georgia thought something was better than nothing, but she never said as much. Staring at the ring, Georgia remembered all of this. She took it, slid it back on her thumb. It fit perfect. Better than before. Had she not felt so dead inside, the ring would have reminded her of how much she loved her brother. Instead, she just thought of the ring as “an accessory that goes back on.”
A place to keep the ring.
Her thumb.
“Don’t you feel better?” her mother asked.
Georgia’s face was stiff from concentrating all morning. From the time she woke up to right now, she had been trying to burn the plant with her mind.
“You look a little grey, honey. Are you okay?”
Georgia nodded.
Then she turned back to the plant and tried with all her might to set it on fire using only her thoughts. If Alice could do it, she could do it. She had the girl’s DNA.
It was possible.
“Can I get you something to eat?” her mother asked.
Georgia wished the woman would just go away. She was done looking at her. Done listening to her. The woman was a titless stranger whose voice sounded like weak children and despair.
“Go feed yourself,” she mumbled.
“That’s not very nice,” her mother said. She tried to smooth back Georgia’s hair, but Georgia pushed her hand away. She felt the abundance of air the moment her mother left. She could breathe again, thankfully.
In the other room, Georgia heard her mother weeping and it only strengthened her determination. By three o’clock, Georgia’s mind was a ball of wet noodles. Tired, grey mush. She went outside, went for a walk, inhaled the fresh air. It annoyed her. She tried to set trees on fire as she walked. Cats, dogs, both parked and moving cars and this old man whose wrinkly white skin upset her stomach. His skin, it was like old pancake batter. Mixed with water and eggs and left on the counter for days.
He took one look at her and crossed the street away from her. She ate his fear and it tasted like honey. Unfortunately, when she was done with him, his dying face remained a soft pinkish white. Not the charred, inflamed hide of crisped flesh she envisioned for him.
When she got back home, she sat in front of the plant again. Because her parents were so in love with this green, vomiting sprig, they told her all its nicknames.
The Swiss cheese plant.
The window leaf.
The Mexican breadfruit.
The balazo.
Because her father bought this thing after doing tons of research (he bought start-up companies, which had him researching just about everything under the blazing hot sun), he told her the plant was a member of the arum family, Araceae.
She didn’t care.
Back then she had Cystic Fibrosis. Back then she was told she would never have children. What the hell did she care about plants?
Fresh from her walk, sitting in the same place as before, sitting Indian-style just like before, she thought of Alice. The way her “little sister” had said it, her mind must first be clear, save for a solitary, focused intention: ignite whatever it was she most desired to burn.
She cleared her mind.
With meditation she could remove the physical stress of the world, unburden her mind, and essentially be a more productive person in life. That’s what Google said. What Google didn’t say was meditation could also make you feel when your body had been made to feel almost nothing. She hoped it could also help you destroy things.
She began to meditate.
The style she used was called transcendental meditation, and it helped her go into a black space inside her mind, a place so dark and so deep, it was like the dead space of a dreamless sleep.
Sitting in her living room, her eyes closed and her mind clear, she envisioned the plant, saw the soft coal-colored plumes lifting like cigarette smoke off the leaves. Saw the edges bl
acken as they were being eaten inward, leaving behind only curled, charred flesh. Saw the first flicker of a flame combust into life. An oxygen eating fairy of mass destruction.
Then she smelled the air in her dead space and the odor was like crack cocaine to her nostrils. Euphoria overwhelmed her. Such was the depth of her meditation.
She took a different tact. Instead of seeing things Alice’s way, she did it her way. She chose to assume a more spiritual perspective. Georgia envisioned herself making an emotional connection to the plant. She envisioned the plant having its own set of open hands. The moment she made a connection, she felt it—that linkage she’d been trying so desperately to construct.
Encouraged, she pushed fire into the plant.
When she finally opened her eyes, she started to cry. One of the leaves near the bottom, one of the blades was dark and smoldering. Not on fire, but lightly blackened.
“What’s that smell?” her mother said from the other room. “Is something burning?”
“Mind your own business, mother,” she said sounding both delighted and cruel at the same time.
2
Georgia refocused her efforts. Took her meditation even deeper. She hit a certain level so dark and so silent, her body began to cook. Her mind was expanding. Feeling the connection in nearly everything. Her fire, she could put in anywhere.
This realization elevated her consciousness. Entire universes were being created inside her head. The possibilities were birthing machines for newer, even greater possibilities.
Is this God? she wondered. Am I God?
Fire, she thought.
Flames.
She saw it all happen first, in her mind. Then she opened her eyes and it happened exactly as she saw it. The plant burst into flame. All the leaves were swallowed in fire, not just part of one. Inside her head, she envisioned the fire stamped out, the flames suffocating.
And it happened; the fire died.
She was on some plane of understanding that felt warm and rounded, solid and airy. If she died and went to heaven, it would feel like this. It would feel like a blessing. Utterly euphoric.