He lays there a moment, flat on his back and out of breath, the dull gray sky stretched out above him. His heart thuds in his chest. With considerable effort, Dignon gets to his hands and knees. A sharp pain rockets across the small of his back but quickly dissipates. Otherwise he seems to be all right. He brushes snow from his trousers and parka then looks around self-consciously. No one has seen, no one has noticed. No one cares.
Suddenly remembering why he was running in the first place, Dignon closes on the trash bag, kneels down and tears it open.
Papers…rotting food…flyers and discarded mail… coffee grounds…
He stares into the trash. His eyes tear, perhaps from the cold. Somewhere deep inside, he can feel himself unraveling.
“Hey.”
Standing in the middle of the street in a hooded jacket is Nikki, her usual huge black purse with the skull and crossbones slung over her shoulder. Sans the giant boots, she instead wears clunky black lace-up shoes. Her eyes blink questioningly from inside the hood, the spider makeup encircling them intact but smudged, like she’s slept in it.
“Hi,” he says dully.
“What are you doing?”
“Just…I don’t know, I…” He motions to the trash.
“Did somebody dump that there?”
“Yeah, I was just about to pick it up.”
Nikki finishes crossing the street, stands over him and what remains of the trash bag. “Unbelievable.” She bends over and attempts to close the tear. “I’ll help you.”
Together, they carry the bag and its contents to the alley between their buildings and dispose of it in one of the trash cans there. Dignon catches a whiff of cigarettes and body odor wafting from her. “Can I ask you a question?” he says, wiping his hands on his parka.
She shrugs. “OK.”
“Were you home last night?”
“Dude, does it look like I was home last night? I’m just getting home now. Couldn’t even get a cab ‘cause of this snow, had to walk my ass here in the cold.” She sniffles then paws at her nose with the back of her hand. “Why?”
“No reason, I…” He tries desperately to think of something to say. “Mrs. Rogo’s apartment’s been dark since yesterday. I was wondering if maybe you knew where she went.”
Nikki looks to the apartment window. “Maybe she went to go visit that snotty daughter of hers. You know the one with the rug-rats?”
“Yeah that’s probably it.” Visions from the night before flood his head. “Nikki, do you know anyone named Bree Harper?”
“Name’s not ringing a bell. Should it?”
“She’s a friend of mine. I thought I saw you with her once.”
“I tend to be really sociable, know what I mean?” She smiles playfully. “Maybe I forgot her name. It happens.”
He stands there, freezing and unable to think of a response.
“Hey, you should’ve seen the shit over by Borges Lane,” Nikki says.
Bree, he thinks. “Borges Lane?”
“Yeah, I partied with this chick who lives near there last night, ended up crashing at her place. Anyway, I’m walking through there on the way home, right? And the whole city’s locked down from the storm, all quiet and eerie and shit—except for those fucking smokestacks of course—and I see flashing lights and all this commotion over on Borges. Fire trucks, an ambulance, cops everywhere, real circus. Some guy threw himself off a roof last night. Guess nobody saw it or knew and he died and got buried in the snow. One of the plows found the body this morning, ran right over it.”
Kyle. He knows it’s him.
“Jesus,” Dignon mutters.
“Personally, if I was gonna do myself I’d take pills or something. I don’t think I’d have the balls to jump off a roof.”
Doesn’t make any difference now, it’s already over for me.
Grasping at straws he says, “Well, I’m glad you’re OK.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” When Dignon looks down awkwardly at the sidewalk rather than answer, she responds with an unexpected smile. “You wanna come up and have some coffee with me?”
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, it’s a beverage.”
“You mean now?”
“No, a week from next Tuesday at noon,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “Whatever, it’s freezing out here, I just thought—”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I’d like to come up and have some coffee with you.” He clears his throat and attempts a smile. “Thank you.”
She stares at him like he’s spoken a language she can’t quite comprehend. After a moment, she cocks her head toward her building. “Come on then.”
* * *
The apartment is small, surprisingly neat and well organized, but decorated in apparent tribute to an earlier era. A huge framed poster dominates the main wall of the living room, a reproduction of The Sex Pistols album, black letters on a pink background that reads: Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, and though the room is sparsely furnished, what’s there is dated and stylistically pure middle to late 1970s. From the bead curtains hanging in the doorways to the lava lamp on the coffee table, to the television (a small set with rabbit ears sitting on a cart), to the stereo (an all-in-one 8-track, turntable and FM tuner), the speakers mounted on shelves built into the wall amidst framed movie posters and a neon bar sign advertising Cold Duck sparkling wine, everything is retro. Dignon sits on a stiff inexpensive couch and takes it all in, awaiting his coffee and Nikki’s return from the kitchen.
He knows she’s lived here quite a while, but there’s something strange about the feel of this apartment. It seems staged, forced somehow, like it’s been constructed with the sole purpose of convincing him she lives here and regularly inhabits this space as her own. In the past, when he’s tried to imagine what her apartment might look like, the picture that forms in his mind has been similar to this, but there’s no true sense of Nikki as a grown woman here. It strikes him as more a set than actual living quarters, a concept piece conjured in the mind of a rebellious teenage girl attempting to find her way, her own sense of style and expression in 1970-something. Or perhaps it’s just someone else’s idea of what it might look like. Maybe that’s it, he thinks, maybe it’s not about who she really is but rather how others see and interpret her. Maybe that’s what Nikki’s life has become, the constant portrayal of a dreary character in someone else’s play.
Dignon cranes his neck in an attempt to see down the narrow hallway off the living room. Surely it leads to the room he’s able to see from the bathroom of his own apartment, but from his position on the couch it remains beyond reach.
Moving through a curtain of clicking and swaying beads, Nikki enters the living room carrying matching glass cups brimming with hot coffee. “It’s instant,” she announces, handing him one. “My Mr. Coffee shit the bed a couple days ago.”
Dignon notices that since she disappeared into the kitchen, she has removed her coat, shoes and socks, and now wears a pair of battered jeans and a gray sleeveless sweatshirt that reads: University of Go-Fuck-Yourself. Several dark tattoos decorate her arms, and her multi-colored shock of hair is mussed and limp rather than in its usual spiked state. She lowers herself into a big square chair that looks like it might’ve been part of a sectional at one point, and tucks her legs beneath her. Her toes are painted with the same black polish adorning her fingernails. “Thanks,” he says, holding up the cup for emphasis before taking a sip. The coffee is harsh, stronger than he’s used to.
“What happened to your finger?” Nikki asks, motioning to his hand.
Dignon considers it a moment. The Band-Aid still looks fresh. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“A blister, I guess,” he tells her. “Top must’ve fallen off, it’s all raw skin. I keep putting a Band-Aid on it but it doesn’t seem to heal.” To buy time, Dignon drinks more coffee.
“So what do you do, anyway?” she asks.
&nbs
p; “I’m on disability at the moment.”
“What are you mental or something?”
He feels himself blush. “I have some issues I’m working out.”
“Shit, get in line. Hope you at least get some decent drugs out of the deal.”
Dignon smiles clumsily. “You work over at that club, right?”
“Yeah, Couplings. Ever been?”
“No. I’ve been by it, though, my sister lives near there.”
“It’s supposed to be a couples club for swingers but mostly it’s just a bunch of horny losers sipping overpriced drinks and looking to get their cocks sucked on.”
“What do you do there?”
“I bartend.” She sips her coffee. “Usually topless.”
Dignon does his best to maintain a neutral expression. “Cool.”
She lets out a bark of laughter that quickly turns into a cough. Nikki remedies this by lighting a cigarette. “You’re all right, Darby.”
“It’s, um, Dignon.”
“Oops.”
“No problem, it’s an unusual name.”
“True. I mean, no offense, but what the hell were your parents thinking?”
“It was my grandfather’s name, my mother’s father,” he explains. “She wanted his name to live on, so she gave it to me.”
“Great, thanks Mom.” She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, throws her head back and blasts a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “Anyway, sorry, we’ve been neighbors since, like, forever, I should know your name by now.”
“Are you from here originally?”
“Dude, nobody’s from here originally. My family moved to Pennsylvania years ago, but I was born and raised in a little town about half an hour from here.”
Dignon hesitates, the steaming coffee just shy of his lips. He lowers the cup. Though he’s tempted to ask the name of her hometown, he doesn’t. He’s not sure why. Instead he says, “Me too.”
“Gotta love those small towns,” Nikki scoffs. “I couldn’t get out of mine fast enough. First chance I got after I hit eighteen, I booked it. Went out to L.A. for a while but it didn’t work out, ended up here. What are you gonna do, right? Everybody’s got to end up somewhere.”
Dignon scans the wall, studies the movie posters.
“I’m kind of a movie freak,” she confesses. “You like movies?”
“I like old movies the best. I wasn’t supposed to but I used to stay up late and watch them when I was little. There was a show on one of the old UHF channels that showed classics every Saturday night at ten and then at midnight they’d switch to old B sci-fi and horror movies like Hercules Against the Moon Men.”
“Shut up!” She slaps the cushion next to her. “I used to watch that channel! This dude with a bad rug and a cheesy tuxedo used to introduce them, right?”
“That’s the one.” Dignon settles on one movie poster in particular. It features an array of colors displayed as a series of small dots arranged into patterns that form a man’s face at the top of the poster and a woman’s at the bottom. Both faces appear troubled.
“Alphaville,” Nikki says. “Jean-Luc Godard.”
He shakes his head.
“Foreign film, really good. The little art theater over by the club shows it now and then. I know an usher there. He let me have one of the posters last time they were showing it.” Nikki adjusts her position in the chair so she can see the poster too. “It’s about this intergalactic secret agent that goes to this city on another planet where a huge fascist computer runs everything. It’s like an Orwellian thing where everyone’s given up their rights to the government and nobody gives a shit about anything. Everybody’s like all mindless and shit, and they have tons of sex but none of it means anything because people aren’t allowed to have emotions. If they show emotion the computer kills them.”
Dignon can almost hear his father scolding Willie for exhibiting emotion.
Don’t be such a goddamn sissy.
“No emotion,” he mumbles.
“Not even love.”
Daddy, don’t.
“We’ve all had sex without love, right?” Before Dignon can answer she says, “But it’s like the lottery or going to Vegas or something. You know you probably won’t win and that the odds are against you, only you don’t give a shit because there’s that chance, that one chance that maybe you’ll get lucky and hit it. Maybe one of these times it won’t just be sex. It’ll be love.” She takes a drag from her cigarette and exhales through her nose. “But in Alphaville there’s not even a chance. The way things are going, Godard probably had it right. They’re already trying to outlaw free thought, emotions can’t be that far behind. Imagine if we could only cry or laugh or feel if the government gave us permission?”
“Who wins?” Dignon asks.
‘What do you mean?”
“In the movie, who wins?”
Nikki lowers her eyes, drinks some coffee. “Nobody wins.”
A gust of wind slams the building.
“Sometimes I feel like Lemmy Caution,” she says, and then, realizing he has no idea who that is, explains, “The guy in Alphaville, the secret agent. I feel like I’m from somewhere else—maybe The Outlands, like him—and I’m stuck in the middle of this fucked up city where nothing makes sense and where nothing’s real or what it appears to be because what it and we were meant to be is so long gone maybe it never even was, you know what I’m saying? Like we’re under the control of something bigger and just sleepwalking through time, marking the days until we get answers, some clue as to what the hell it’s all about.”
Dignon swallows coffee, hopeful she’ll continue. He’s never even thought about Nikki in any meaningful context. She’s always been the oddball woman next door with the crazy hair and the wild outfits, and suddenly, she has revealed herself to be a fully formed human being with intelligence and emotion, with soul. Had he really expected anything less? He’s always instinctually recognized the aura of loneliness just beneath her flamboyant guise, and maybe that’s why he’s been fascinated by her, why he’s felt a kinship of sorts to her, albeit from a distance. Now, with the opportunity to see her as she truly is, Dignon realizes she possesses many of the same subtle looks or awkward mannerisms he sometimes catches himself displaying, tells that signal uneasiness in her own skin, discomfort with her own existence. It is pain not from outside but from within, an affliction managed though never quite cured. “‘What is the privilege of the dead?’” she asks, quoting Alphaville. “‘To die no more.’ How cool is that?”
“Maybe it’s all a myth,” he suggests.
“Life’s too painful to be a fable. Nice thought, though.”
His fingertip is sore beneath the Band-Aid. Dignon presses it against the side of the coffee mug until he feels warmth and the ache subsides. “I don’t know,” he says. “Some fables are awfully brutal. Remember the fairy tales from when we were kids?”
“I try not to.” She shakes her head and runs a hand through her hair, fluffing it with her fingers. “When I lived at home my life was so boring and nowhere, I mean, I used to sit around trying to dream shit up just to make it interesting, you know? What kind of life is it if you have to constantly do things to remind yourself you’re still alive?”
The wind whips across the building again, its ferocity gaining momentum.
“We lived in this little house on a quiet rural street,” Nikki says, looking at the window over Dignon’s shoulder, her painted and smudged eyes reflecting a sudden distance. “We only had two neighbors and there was a lot of space between the houses, a couple acres or more, so it was kind of like not having neighbors at all. My bedroom was upstairs and faced the street. When I was in high school I used to get undressed in front of the window just for kicks and to see how it would feel and what might happen, you know? I did it probably twenty times, and you know what? Nobody ever noticed. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the street since it was so out of the way, but even now and then when a car would go by, they didn’t see me.
I’d stand there naked in front of that window with the light on for hours, just thinking. The house was quiet, nothing moving outside, nobody around but a sky full of stars, and I’d convince myself that maybe somewhere—maybe even in one of those houses—somebody was watching, somebody could see. And when I pretended they could that’s when I felt it. That’s when I felt alive.” A tense smile twitches across her face. “And then one day, a car did stop. It drove by at first, but the brake lights came on really fast and the car backed up and pulled over right in front of the house. It was really late, my parents were asleep and except for my room the house was dark. But the driver, he shut his car lights off anyway. He must’ve been lost or something—who knows—but nobody came down that road unless they meant to or took a wrong turn. Still, it was so weird, for the first time I didn’t have to wonder if someone could see me, someone way off in the distance. Whoever was in that car had seen me, was seeing me, and whoever he was, he needed to watch just like I needed to show him. Shit, I was seventeen years old and standing in the light while some guy I didn’t know and couldn’t see looked at me. I didn’t do anything, I just stood there. A couple minutes later the headlights came back on and the car drove off. I never saw it again, but even after it left, I stayed in the window for some reason. I always figured when it happened—when I knew for sure—it’d be the most erotic thing ever. It wasn’t. I was turned on a little but it was more than that. There was something spiritual about it, and after a while the night changed. It was liquid, you know? Washing over me and moving inside me like blood, keeping me alive and connected to…something.” She puts the remains of her coffee aside then takes a final pull on her cigarette and butts it in a plastic ashtray. “When I was alone again and had to wonder if anyone was watching, it all started to make sense. There was somebody out there, I was sure of it, somebody who saw me. Me. It wasn’t dirty at all. There was beauty to it, purity we couldn’t quite touch, but it was out there swimming in that night sky between us. And it mattered. I could feel it. It mattered.”
Blood In Electric Blue Page 14