Ultraluminous

by Katherine Faw

  * * *

  I tie a ribbon around my waist so the two tails of the bow slide down the crack of my ass. I text a photo to all five of them.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night the calf’s brain guy and I go dancing at the dim-sum parlor.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  All the tables have been cleared away. I look for the dessert-cart lady behind the bar, pouring egg-custard-flavored shots. At least she’s not there. He’s holding me plastered to his chest.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says.

  Naturally patterns create intersections, I think. The good thing is everyone’s smoking. I put a cigarette between my teeth. I feel pacified. I blow smoke away from the calf’s brain guy’s ear.

  “Don’t do anything. That’s what I would do,” I say.

  * * *

  The art guy shows me the film of my butt.

  “This is long,” I say.

  Also it’s large. It’s projected on his special white wall. I expect him to touch himself but he just sits there. I anticipate the part where I look over my shoulder. I get up and leave the room before I show my face.

  * * *

  I bring a bath towel up to the ex-Ranger’s tar paper roof. I lie on it and tan myself. The ex-Ranger comes up through the hatch door. He stands above me.

  “How much does it cost to fuck you?”

  I’m wearing sunglasses but also I put my hand over my eyes.

  “What?” I say.

  He starts counting out the hundreds I just left in his bathroom. There’s no wind. He doesn’t really mean it. The bills fall onto my stomach one by one.

  “Keep going,” I say.

  * * *

  He fucks me in the sun. He hugs his whole body to mine and drops his head in the crook of my sweating neck. He flips me over to look at me. That I’m in love with him doesn’t change anything.

  * * *

  I’m giving the guy who buys me things a hand job in the back of a car and the driver keeps looking in the rearview. I meet his eyes and roll mine and his dart away. He must know rich people do things wherever they want, or he needs to learn.

  * * *

  “Your pussy is so warm.”

  “I’m alive.”

  The junk-bond guy makes a face above me. I think of how clean I am: my asshole rimmed with soap, my body scrubbed with sugar, my skin slathered in shea butter, my nails filed, my cuticles cut, my pussy stripped, my brows tweezed, my teeth bleached, my hair shined, my perimeter of perfume. Many times I have thought, what am I going to do with this body?

  “I can’t believe it either,” I say.

  * * *

  After the man tried to kill me I still waited for the Sheikh and it felt like it could go on forever but of course it didn’t. My residence visa expired and I didn’t buy another one. I bought a plane ticket to JFK instead.

  * * *

  My heroin dreams dwindle and end and then I snort three more bags.

  36

  I tan myself on my own roof. I open my eyes and see an old queen.

  “You’re not wearing any clothes,” he says.

  “It’s a workday,” I say.

  “It’s Memorial Day.”

  Summer, I think, like a child, because actually it’s three weeks away.

  * * *

  I’m wearing a bombastic white jumpsuit. I pull my hair off my neck and turn around for the calf’s brain guy. He punches me. My ears ring.

  * * *

  The art guy has a pool on his roof. He looks at me lecherously from a lounge chair. I look back at him from a pink plastic float.

  “How come we never go skinny-dipping?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  It’s a pleasant sensation being suspended like this, weightless above the heavy city. People who think it never ends think this is what it’s like: hovering in the air, unmoved by earthly emotions. I laugh to myself. That’s not heaven. Heroin’s ten dollars a bag.

  “What?” the art guy says.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I kick my foot in the water and the float drifts away.

  * * *

  I kick his shin.

  “Look at my eye.”

  He’s sitting on the futon and I’m standing up. He looks at my face. He grabs it by the chin.

  “What do you want me to do? You want me to kill him?”

  “No,” I say.

  As soon as the ex-Ranger lets me go I climb in his lap and wrap my arms and legs around him.

  * * *

  At Duane Reade the cashier sucks in all his breath. I’m wearing zero makeup.

  “You shouldn’t let him do you like that,” he says.

  “It was an extra grand.”

  He makes a disgusted face.

  “Fuck off,” I say.

  He refuses to ring me up.

  * * *

  It’s monstrous that light ten or a thousand years old is just now reaching people who look up at the stars and make maps and meaning of it. It’s like the dancing ghost girls. It’s like the suicidal poet living on and on in his pretty words. It’s like the light of me will reach another world before this one dies. I wake up in an impossible position. My knees jammed into my face, in the smallest ball, in an inside corner of my couch.

  * * *

  I put my hand on his cock.

  “Hey,” I say.

  I’m a little too high, like I timed it wrong. I close my eyes.

  “I just want to close my eyes and let you do things to me,” I say.

  “You need to take better care of yourself,” he says.

  I look at the guy who buys me things. My concealer hasn’t changed.

  “You never said anything before.”

  He shrugs. I put my arms around him and lay my head on his shoulder.

  “Sometimes it’s scary,” I say.

  He lays his head on top of mine. We’re in the lobby of the Time Warner Center and people stream around.

  * * *

  I pick the shortest line and end up with hot pho. I’m underneath the art guy’s apartment, in gas fumes, but I’m not with him. Across the jammed picnic table I smile into the sunglasses of the junk-bond guy.

  “Remember last year?”

  “I do,” I say.

  He means last summer, our first date. That was two weeks after I flew into JFK and in three weeks it will be summer again. He bites the head off a fried anchovy.

  “Best year of my life,” he says.

  “Liar.”

  I think of the burning sun and the best year of mine.

  * * *

  I thought of the burning sun and true happiness and how sad that was. I thought of the Sheikh, who disappeared to marry a virgin his mother picked out. I thought of my mother, who went nowhere, whose brilliance had dimmed and gone out by the time I knew her. I thought of the rich man who paid to fuck me and then tried to kill me. I thought of all the other rich men who paid to fuck me, who had the money to buy a girl too beautiful, too young, too sparkling, like the laws of the universe didn’t apply to them, to act like a fantasy and not a person, a thing they could leave on the floor of a hotel room when they got bored like anything else they once had to possess. I thought of how I could be bought. I thought of the whole, overall pattern of my life. I thought of how old I was. August in Dubai, even when I moved from my air-conditioned apartment to an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned restaurant in an air-conditioned mall, was unbearably hot. All the time I felt suffocated. I made a decision. I would go home and give myself one year.

  * * *

  Every week, every day, every hour, every minute, every second everything is changing. It’s dying and it’s never coming back. I miss my gold-teeth nails. I look at the foil wrapped around my fingers and mourn them.

  37

  I bury my face in the neck of the calf’s brain guy so we don’t have to speak. He squeezes his arms around me tight but I don’t feel suffocated. He just wants to injure me in ways that will fade o
r I can fix, that’s who he is, not a killer.

  * * *

  While the art guy is sleeping I creep into his glass living room. I sit on his hard black couch. I look at his camera on its tripod. I get up and take off the lens cap and push the power button and sit down again. I see myself in the viewfinder naked and tiny and all hair. I look into the eye of the camera and I don’t say anything.

  “Karina?” the art guy says.

  “Coming, baby,” I say.

  I shut it off and hurry back to the bedroom.

  * * *

  With my phone I take a photo of my face. I move into the right light and take another one. Then I delete them.

  * * *

  I put my hands on the ex-Ranger’s forehead. I press my thumbs between his eyebrows. He holds me by my upper arms. We’re at the cop bar, on two stools, but it feels like we are nowhere and on nothing.

  “Sometimes you make me happy,” I say.

  He giggles his nasty giggle. I imagine us in the future. I see two old junkies bickering on a street in Queens. I giggle my nasty giggle, too.

  * * *

  “Do you want to get a coffee?”

  I’m pointing the hair dryer at the TODAY girl like a gun. I put it down.

  “No,” I say.

  * * *

  This Popsicle is café con leche flavored. I lick it and smoke a cigarette at the same time. Three teenage girls say something mean to me. Later I watch a middle-aged lady salsa in a circle of men. I’m in Tompkins Square Park and the air smells like liquor. Later still I eat a plain slice on a bench beside two white-haired women who are bitching about their mailman, who steals packages, and I almost start crying.

  * * *

  When I was a little girl I was not allowed to go to Tompkins Square. Stuyvesant Town had its own park, as my mother always pointed out, and playgrounds numbered one to twelve. In the center of the Stuy Town Oval was a fountain and on the worst days of winter it would freeze. The falling water would stop in long, solid shapes that bothered me. Because it was stuck in a pattern that was random. That was how it was just because at that second it was cold enough. Also it was freakish, how it had changed states. The ice looked beautiful and mean. I looked at it from a little away until I was no longer bothered but mesmerized. I wasn’t allowed to go to Tompkins Square because it was full of junkies, nodding, in their own worlds, who also bothered me.

  * * *

  It was the first drug I ever did. I had never even smoked pot. I walked out of the woods of Stuy Town, down the concrete of Avenue B, all arms and all legs, with ten dollars in my fist. But the man gave it to me for free.

  “Taste this. Come back if you like it,” he said.

  I snort an ISIS bag and I’m jealous of my twelve-year-old self, with all that brand-new power, about to do heroin for the only first time.

  * * *

  After he’s come but while he’s still sweating all over me I reach back and hold the balls of the guy who buys me things.

  “How do you always know what to do?”

  “I can read your mind,” I say.

  He laughs into my collarbone but I’m not joking. I can. All their minds are the same.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy takes me to an office tower in Midtown, the headquarters of Morgan Stanley. We ride the elevator to a high floor. Everyone there is happy to see him. Though he does not introduce me all of the men speak to me. None of the women do. They give that hurt look like I get on the subway but much deeper. At the end of a hallway the junk-bond guy opens a door.

  “This was my office,” he says.

  I peek inside. I see the river and this time it’s the Hudson.

  “Look at that view,” I say.

  For lunch we go around the corner to an overpriced diner. I hold up my surprisingly good martini in a toast.

  “Where you used to be king.”

  38

  Somebody tries to open the door and I grab her wrist.

  “Don’t worry, my love, I keep it locked,” she says.

  The wax lady rubs me down with vitamin E.

  “That’s smart,” I say.

  * * *

  I was dumb like any eighteen-year-old. This girl told me her friend’s sister did it. She said she went over there for one year and made enough money that she wouldn’t have to work for five.

  “You have to do all the pervert shit, not just fuck them. You have to do whatever they want. Like old men, like with harems.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “They buy you stuff, too, whatever you want,” she said.

  We were doing coke in the bathroom at a club in Chelsea where we were both bottle girls.

  * * *

  I have to get my hair cut again. I look at the curled-up ends around my chair and resent them. They are naturally nerveless and bloodless and emotionless and it felt like nothing when the scissors cut them. I look at the hairdresser.

  “Don’t you want a photo for your Instagram?”

  “Last time you said no,” she says.

  I let her take one of the curls falling down my back.

  * * *

  The calf’s brain guy is making me come so many times. I’m light-headed. Also we’re on a Circle Line cruise and everything is unsteady. Everyone who was at the dim-sum parlor the other night is now here. That’s what it feels like. I see my pleasured face in the ship bathroom’s scratchy mirror.

  “God, stop,” I say.

  “I have forty million dollars just in the bank. I deserve you,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  * * *

  A shirtless man wearing a cape that is the American flag makes me a balloon animal on the train.

  “It’s a rat.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  It’s hot pink. I carry it by the tail down the street. When the art guy opens his apartment door I drop it at his feet.

  * * *

  At the bodega a wasted guy starts throwing hundreds on the counter in front of me.

  “You need to be wearing a dress, girl, some high-heel shoes. Look at you.”

  I look at my flip-flops. I push one of the bills toward the bodega guy.

  “Let me get a carton,” I say.

  * * *

  Back at my apartment I am compelled to get rid of everything I own. I open my closet and look at my beautiful dresses. There are too many prints and colors, all clashing. I pull out every one that is not black, white, or red.

  * * *

  “Here. I brought you something.”

  I dump out all my empty dope bags onto his futon. He laughs.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” the ex-Ranger says.

  I fling my hand around at his blank walls.

  “Decorate,” I say.

  * * *

  On Park Avenue I smoke a cigarette outside the office of the guy who buys me things. The junk-bond guy’s office is over on Broadway. I watch the guy selling Sabrett hot dogs from his street cart. I rub a finger on the extreme tension at the base of one of my eyebrows.

  * * *

  We lie on the white bed stripped to the sheets. Our foreheads are touching and our knees and our feet. I put my hands flat on the junk-bond guy’s chest.

  “Oh, baby,” he says.

  He sounds distressed.

  “Oh, baby,” I say.

  Outside it’s getting so hot.

  39

  Our dessert’s too lovely. It’s meringue, mini violets, and sugared ice.

  “I can’t eat that.”

  “For a year I’d pay you a million,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  “That’s only one-fortieth of just what you have in your bank account. That’s probably less than your interest,” I say.

  “Okay, two.”

  I put one of the tiny violets in my mouth but I don’t bite it.

  * * *

  I hold onto the balcony railing and look across the East River to the dark park on the Manhattan side. When I was a teenager I was doing this same thing b
ut looking at Brooklyn. The perspective has flipped. The art guy comes in me. Of course I wasn’t getting paid either. I had this boyfriend who broke my heart.

  * * *

  “I’m looking for a job,” he says.

  “Great,” I say.

  I’m looking at his wall where he’s taped up my heroin bags but erratically. The rows are wavy and make no visual sense.

  “I’ve always had to work. My whole life.”

  He says this in a self-righteous way, like I haven’t. On the futon I turn my head to the ex-Ranger. I brush off his shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Just getting the chip off your shoulder,” I say.

  * * *

  There will come a time before the universe ends when each particle will be isolated in its own horizon but that is now. TODAY. I roll my face into a corner of my couch.

  * * *

  We get coffee at the café inside the gym.

  “What does your tattoo mean?”

  “That it’s today. It’s never tomorrow or yesterday,” the TODAY girl says.

  “That’s what I thought,” I say.

  “It’s a reminder. When I see my back in the mirror.”

  I feel slightly sick. We’re not in a bathroom. There’s only double espresso, no cocaine.

  “What do you do?” she says.

  I laugh.

  “You would like this book,” I say.

  From my gym bag I give her the suicidal poet.

  * * *

  “How much would it cost to have you all to myself?”

  It’s not just a coincidence that I’m having this conversation twice in one week. We are at that stage in our relationship, all of us. We are nine months in, thirty-nine weeks. It’s natural.

  “Give me a number,” I say.

  “Forty thousand a month plus all expenses,” the guy who buys me things says.

  I play with his wedding ring.

  “I want another martini,” I say.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy fucks me in the maid’s room on the smoky couch. I think about how troubled he was last week. I curve around to look at him.