“I’ve lived there before. I feel it in my blood.”
The confidence angered Lovedeep. She turned and walked hurriedly to a seat and looked out with studied indifference through the window. Beyond the rows of parked cars and the uniform line of trees shielding the highway, a deep blood red soaked the sky.
That night she dreamed of a naked old man in a cowboy hat hopping cross-legged from one feathery cloud to another while his knees streamed blood and his limp penis flopped menacingly between his hairy thighs. The dream must mean something and she told herself to write it down and think on it, though she never did, and a week later, trying to recall it, all she could remember was a floating cowboy hat taunting her from the heavens. The memory held an erotic charge, though why, Lovedeep could not say.
The first week’s class had ended with a group meditation. Only by emptying the mind, the instructor said, could you successfully empty the closet.
Saying that, she began chanting. It was some sort of Indian-sounding nonsense. Lovedeep kept her eyes wide open the whole time out of a rising fury. When it was over, she told herself she would not return for the second week and instead would write a fierce letter of complaint to the school. In any event, she no longer required a second week. The most important of her goals was now considerably closer to being achieved.
She was on the road to falling in love.
He sat two rows in front during that first week, tossing his head absently from side to side, scratching his neck, and leaning back to yawn. Standing and turning to exit when the instructor announced the break, their eyes met and he grimaced at her. The grimace telegraphed both boredom and complicity. Lovedeep assumed he was equally irritated by the instructor’s new age quackery.
Outside, in the parking lot of the strip mall, he told her his name. It was Ian. Amid high fluorescents shimmering against polished car bodies, the name sounded irresistibly exotic.
“Do you like it?” he said, nodding his head to indicate the class.
“The instructor’s an idiot,” Lovedeep said. “It’s a waste of money. I don’t know why I came.”
He nodded, saying nothing. He had driven from over fifty miles away, just for this class. He liked to get out of his own town, away from people who might know him.
“The highways are empty this time of night,” he said. It was as if he was revealing one of the secret laws of the universe.
Before the break was over, she had written her number on a torn corner of scratch paper and offered it to him. He stared at it, “Lovedeep?” and thrust it into his trouser pocket. “What kind of name is that?”
“Indian,” she said defensively.
“Oh.”
“Have you been there?”
“I’ve never thought about the place.” He spoke dully, with a lack of excitement, as if signaling he wasn’t one of those guys hunting after the latest fad ethnicity to date and notch onto his belt of conquests.
After she handed him the phone number, his right hand began to shake visibly. “Are you alright?” she asked.
He didn’t know what she was talking about, and she told him that his hand was shaking.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “It’s not shaking, it’s perfectly still.”
It began to shake more violently after he said that. His whole arm seemed to be undergoing a series of uncontrollable spasms.
“See,” he said.
He must be shy of his disability, she thought, and decided not to question him further.
“Oh, yes,” Lovedeep said. “I can see it now. It’s not moving. It must be the light.”
“There’s a lot of people in India,” he said.
“There is.”
“A lot of people must die? People must die and no one cares?”
She had never thought about such an India before, an India of countless thousands dying every day. It conjured an image of bodies stacked on bodies, like the movies the first horrified GIs took of the concentration camps in Germany after liberation. In her mind, the stack of bodies grew ever higher, until the ground itself could no longer support the weight, and the continent sank into the warm southern waters under the pressure of so much dead flesh.
“It’s a cruel place,” she said finally.
She followed him back into the class. All the while, his arm shook violently.
Lovedeep worked at a medical billing clearing house, passing bills from one vendor to another, double-checking for errors, cross-billing or overpayment, recommending recalcitrant accounts for collections action. The adjoining cubicle was occupied by Marjorie, whose job was similar, and though Lovedeep had been here for only two years, Marjorie had worked at the firm for eight. Why she had never applied for promotion, Lovedeep never asked and Marjorie never ventured. They worked at the end of a pointless L-shaped room, where the architect, perhaps having drawn himself into a corner, had left a sort of void. Few people ever had any reason to turn the corner where their desks sat together and say hello. Was this why they had become friends? Because fate had swept them both into this unpeopled hinterland?
Marjorie’s desk was littered with bric-a-brac, photos, toys, the remnants of countless lunches swallowed while surfing the internet. New trash appeared daily, invisibly, as if Marjorie herself took no part in the accumulation, but that, having been washed down river, it reached her cubicle and found it could travel no farther. It stopped, having struck a dam. This thought disturbed Lovedeep. She feared she too would be consumed eventually, that the trash burying Marjorie’s desk would overflow and fill hers, that together they would be drowned. It was because of this fear that she’d taken it upon herself to draw Marjorie out and become her friend, believing Marjorie’s particular stagnation could be alleviated by companionship.
The day after the first evening of the de-cluttering class, Lovedeep told Marjorie about Ian. Marjorie said she hoped he would call, and she wanted to hear all about it, but that Lovedeep should not get her hopes up. More damage had been done in the world by false hopes than by anything else, she said, though she did not elaborate on this statement with specific evidence. Lovedeep, despite noticing this lack, said nothing.
The class was held on Tuesday night, and therefore Lovedeep expected Ian to call on Thursday afternoon. She’d given him her landline number, not her cell, which she kept at the office. He would leave a message and she would call him back on Thursday evening, after she’d had a drink with Marjorie, and they would make plans for either Friday or Saturday night.
On Thursday afternoon, using her cell phone, Lovedeep dialed her home phone every quarter hour, expecting to find a message from Ian. Her spirits rose when she called for the seventh time and found the line engaged. Someone else was calling. Previously, the few times she’d found her phone engaged, she’d become afraid a burglar was at that moment sitting on her bed and making calls to his many overseas lovers and inviting all the other local felons over to ransack the apartment. Of course, it was always only her mother, asking if she was coming to visit that weekend or complaining about her father.
Still holding the phone to her ear while the busy signal beeped, she tapped the wall of her cubicle and Marjorie’s head appeared. “It’s him,” Lovedeep said. “He’s leaving a message.” Marjorie nodded and made a motion to smoke a phantom cigarette and threw five fingers into the air. “Right,” Lovedeep nodded, “see you out there.”
A minute later, Lovedeep called home again. The message was from her mother.
She stood outside next to the sign reading SMOKING AREA and told Marjorie her father’s knees were hurting again. “Bad, is it?” Marjorie said and blew smoke into the air. “Not very,” Lovedeep said. “Mom worries.” Marjorie told a dirty joke about a priest with a bum knee, a young boy and a tuba player. Lovedeep never understood Marjorie’s jokes but she always laughed as if she did. This time was no different.
Neither spoke about Ian’s non-existent message.
Lovedeep decided this was done out of tact on Marjorie’s par
t, but worried later if Marjorie simply didn’t care. Because Lovedeep had spent so much time cultivating Marjorie’s friendship, Marjorie was her only friend at work, but she remained troubled over whether Marjorie felt the same toward her as she did toward Marjorie. It was Lovedeep who telephoned Marjorie when the two were not at work, and it was Lovedeep who invited Marjorie to go out for happy hour on Thursday nights. The Thursday night happy hour included half-priced margaritas and complimentary personal pizzas and bread sticks. On Friday night, by comparison, only peanuts were on offer and the drinks were merely a dollar off.
Several weeks earlier, she had asked Marjorie why she never invited her to happy hour, and Marjorie said plainly, “You say it first,” which was true. The following Thursday, Lovedeep decided to wait for Marjorie to say it first.
Her routine was to wait until after lunch, and on the Thursday of the experiment, Lovedeep was able to wait an additional twenty-seven minutes before she broke down and invited her friend to happy hour. But Marjorie had other plans that night, she had a date. “When were you going to tell me?” Lovedeep said, barely able to conceal her hurt. “I didn’t know it mattered,” Marjorie said. “I promise to tell you about it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow arrived and Marjorie said nothing.
This silence was the cause of no small resentment on Lovedeep’s part, but she felt she could not quiz her friend, for Marjorie had promised, and asking would only raise the specter of the broken promise between them.
On the following Thursday, when it came time to ask Marjorie to happy hour that night, Lovedeep was unable to articulate the request. Her mouth froze and she stood before Marjorie’s cubicle as if before a judge’s chair, paralyzed, finding it suddenly difficult to breathe.
A half hour later, the two women stood leaning against the stucco exterior of the building, smoking Virginia Slims, and Lovedeep listened as Marjorie spoke for ten uninterrupted minutes about a neighbor’s dog that had barked all night long. It wasn’t Marjorie’s neighbor, it was a friend’s neighbor’s dog, and Marjorie’s indignation was on her friend’s account, not her own. Walking back inside, Lovedeep wondered, if a dog had kept her awake all night, would Marjorie’s indignation have been equally forceful. It was not a question she wanted to find an answer to, and sitting back down, a weight descended on her. It was a feeling of dull nausea.
Two photographs were pinned to the familiar faded pink fabric covering of her cubicle wall. In one, her mother stood in front of a life-size plaster statue of a giraffe with the paint peeling. In the other, her father supported a slice of cake and stared with sour embarrassment at the camera. Neither of her parents could remember where or when each was taken, and this small mystery had always excited Lovedeep. Not everything was known, things remained to be discovered, the universe still guarded secrets. Indeed, there were times she looked down at the piles of papers scattered across her desk: receipts, invoices, queries, letters, memos, printed out emails, threats for legal action, etc., and could not comprehend what they were. Even paper lost the quality of its paperness. At such moments, the world glowed with a tangible strangeness and danger. Anything might happen. She might fall madly in love. She might be brutally murdered. Both prospects thrilled her equally.
Marjorie tapped the divider and a moment later, her head appeared. “Well?”
Lovedeep, her face upturned, stared wide-eyed. Since returning from the smoking break, the universe had lost its edge of unknowing. The photographs were mysteries only because her parents lacked the interest to trace the memories. The papers spread out in piles impinging on her keyboard were dull and self-explanatory. The color of the fabric of her cubicle walls represented nothing more than a measurable wavelength of light. The world was what it was and nothing more and would forever remain exactly this.
Marjorie wanted to know if Lovedeep was going to ask her to happy hour that night, because if Lovedeep wasn’t, she’d have to come up with another plan, and quickly, as it was already late in the afternoon. Yes, Lovedeep had wanted to ask earlier, something had stopped her talking. Didn’t Marjorie notice her friend standing there, nearly choking, trying to get the words out?
Marjorie winced. Was that what that was?
The flat screen television behind the bar was tuned to a news channel and on her third margarita, Lovedeep looked up to be confronted by a video close-up of a dead woman’s face. The woman had been strangled.
“Another one?” Marjorie said.
“Is that number two or three?”
“Number three.”
The killer was known as the Internet Strangler because after each murder he released a video-nasty onto the internet of the dead woman’s face. Nothing else, just a close-up running for as long as five minutes. The report excerpted a few seconds from the whole video and the stricken face of the newscaster returned. The music was loud in the bar and the television sound was switched off. The running subtitles for the deaf were largely incomprehensible due to the high number of spelling errors and typos. A composite sketch appeared, showing a round, balding head and a man with sleepy, humorless eyes.
Lovedeep decided he looked cute.
On her fourth drink and third free personal pizza, Marjorie confessed that last week she had lied when she said she had a date. She had wanted to do something different, by herself, maybe go to a different bar, maybe get picked up by a stranger, get fucked in the bathroom, that kind of thing. She didn’t. She went home and watched television and, in the middle of the night, woke up in a fright, walked into the living room naked, switched on all the lights and opened the curtains, and took hold of her one potted plant and threw it out the window. It landed and shattered on a car’s hood with a thundering crash. In seconds, an alarm started blasting.
“What happened?” Lovedeep was mesmerized.
Nothing happened, Marjorie said. After five minutes, the alarm went silent and in the morning, she woke, naked and sprawled in the living room as if the victim of a rape. She passed the car as she left for work. The remnants of the potted plant were still there and a dent bruised the hood. On her return in the evening, the car had vanished, and so had any sign of the plant.
Marjorie lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Lovedeep’s face. Then she pulled back and grinned, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” though it was unclear exactly what Marjorie was apologizing for. A lingering sense of discomfort followed Lovedeep to the women’s room. It was here she first spotted the flyer taped to the wall, next to the mirror. “CLOSET FULL? LIFE EMPTY?” the bold letters stated. “Change your life. Throw out the old you. Start from scratch. Get moving today on the path to a clutter-free future.” She tore off one of the tabs with the phone number for information; then suddenly, as if possessed, ripped the flyer from the tiles and walked out. She slapped it onto the counter in front of Marjorie. “I’m going to this next week,” she said. “Do you want to come?” Marjorie’s head was down, her fingers curled around the stem of a margarita glass. A minute passed before Lovedeep realized her friend was asleep.
The only reason Lovedeep returned for the second week of the de-cluttering class was in the hope of seeing Ian again. The same short-haired instructor sat cross-legged on the metal desk at the front of the room and started proceedings with a breathing and affirmation exercise. “Imagine you are sitting in a garden surrounded by empty shelves,” she said softly. “You hear a waterfall and see a closet with absolutely nothing in it. You are the closet. Say it to yourself, with each inward breath. Say, I am the empty closet waiting for life to fill me up.” Lovedeep kept her eyes wide open and remained furious while around her women mostly expanded their chests and breathed out noisily through their mouths.
Ian was nowhere, and she felt humiliated and cheated.
During the break, she confronted the instructor. Did she remember the man with the round head from last week, so tall, a little pudgy, with sleepy eyes? Yes, the instructor said, he was a weird one. She was glad he didn’t come back. “Bad vibes. Ugly, even. I’d sta
y clear if I was you.” Lovedeep decided the instructor was jealous. She plucked up her courage. “Do you have his number?” she asked. The instructor took a moment to consider her response, took hold of Lovedeep’s wrist and brought her mouth close to Lovedeep’s ear.
“We’re after bigger things, aren’t we, you and I,” she whispered. Lovedeep didn’t know what she was talking about. The instructor continued, “We want to overturn our lives. Start from scratch, tear open our bodies.” The instructor’s breath beat warmly against Lovedeep’s ear. “Listen to me, I know what you need. Come with me to India. Take me there. Please.”
The instructor’s nails pressed into the flesh of Lovedeep’s wrist. “We can do it together, we can walk from the bottom of India all the way to the top.”
Saying that, her nails pressed so hard that Lovedeep let out a cry and wildly yanked her arm free. She turned furiously and started racing past the stunned eyes of her fellow students.
Behind her, the instructor called out her name.
Lovedeep slammed open the door and threw herself into the crowd of milling smokers and out into the parking lot with its warm air smelling of car exhaust. Once inside her own car, she burst into tears. The instructor was right. She wanted more than anything to overturn her life, to start anew, to become someone else entirely. She turned on the engine and drove away, thinking that she was nothing more than a coward.
Good Indian Girls: Stories Page 4