Ultraluminous

by Katherine Faw

  “Religious art is the worst.”

  I laugh at the art guy.

  “You have a good memory but that’s not actually true,” I say.

  “Do you remember our first date, at my apartment?”

  He puts his arms around my neck from behind.

  “I knew you were dangerous right away,” the art guy says.

  I grab his wrists. We are also in a black box but it is big and cooled, with a movie playing on one wall, and it doesn’t feel like a coffin at all, just a void. Later I say I feel sick and ask to go home early.

  * * *

  Art is the opposite of life. In life politics is acceptable and religion is not, as a reason to start a war. In Beirut I felt, but did not see, a car explode. In the hotel room the man I was with hugged me close to him. He had brought me on his business trip.

  “We are fine,” he said.

  I remember thinking I could never feel fervor like that and that something was wrong with me.

  * * *

  “Me and my cousin are going to pick up the couch tomorrow or the next day, cool?” the delivery guy says.

  “You don’t live in the Riis Houses, do you?”

  “Fuck no,” he says.

  He’s watching a movie on my computer. I draw my knees up on the black leather couch, which is plain, no design.

  “The next day,” I say.

  I pull three bags out of a bundle and then drop the brick on the floor because the coffee table is gone.

  “From JIHAD to XXX.”

  “Sex sells, too,” the delivery guy says.

  I agree with him.

  * * *

  The spindly silver stilettos feel like when they break they will also make my ankles shatter. I wear them to the corner.

  “It’s my birthday, can I get a free pack of cigarettes?”

  The bodega guy looks at me.

  “Let me see your ID,” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  * * *

  It is my birthday. I give myself what I always do.

  * * *

  After midnight I turn on my phone again. I walk thirty blocks to the cop bar.

  “Where have you been?” the ex-Ranger says.

  I look at him. There’s no point.

  “Fucking other guys,” I say.

  He nods at me.

  “Right.”

  “There’s no point to you and me.”

  “Right,” he says.

  I think he should be like giving my couch away but he’s not.

  * * *

  There’s a substitute teacher for the stripper class and I’m disgusted. It’s not nearly nasty enough. It was already co-opted and now it’s naïve, like stripping is a girl-power dreamland. In the steam room a girl who is not the TODAY girl, who acted like a job is a job but probably never wants to see me again after finding out I’m a whore, sighs loudly and repeatedly and I have a strong desire to wrap the cord of a hair dryer around her neck that’s probably never been strangled because I am full of fucking rage.

  * * *

  I buy batteries that could be used for my smoke detector. I look at it, disabled, up there on the wall.

  * * *

  I wake up and think I’m not breathing.

  “What time is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what time it is. I’m paying for the night.”

  I drop my head back down on the guy who buys me things. It does matter, I think.

  * * *

  If I could see myself with altitude I wouldn’t see I’m at a latitude and longitude, on a grid of streets and avenues, a dot among other dots, sometimes still and sometimes scrambling. I wouldn’t be able to see myself at all. It matters because time is the one thing I can stop when I decide to. I don’t say any of this to the junk-bond guy. I hold the elastic of his boxer shorts in the entrance to his apartment.

  “Bye, sweetheart,” he says.

  “Bye, baby.”

  I peek over my shoulder before he closes the door.

  45

  My first pattern, when I was a little girl, was the vinyl floor of our kitchen. It was a red and white checkerboard that gradually crumbled away to show the gritty black tar underneath. My mother never replaced a tile, like she never replaced anything. What was new and shiny got old and fucked-up and stayed that way. She let all things run their natural course and every year the degrading pattern of the kitchen floor made me never want to be anything like her a little more.

  * * *

  I go into Duane Reade purely for the air-conditioning.

  “Why don’t you guys have café tables so I can eat here?”

  The cashier does not want to play this game with me.

  “Ma’am,” he says.

  “Miss,” I say.

  I hand over the sushi and acetone nail-polish remover for bagging. Even though he called me old I’m in a good mood. The calf’s brain guy is on a business trip and I don’t have to deal with him this week.

  * * *

  We are skinny-dipping in his pool. It’s not late. Sometimes other people come up on the roof but then they go away.

  “You’re going to get yelled at.”

  “This is not a co-op,” he says.

  The art guy twirls my wet hair around his fist.

  “When I was a little girl a little boy tried to drown me but I didn’t let him,” I say.

  The art guy pushes my head under the water and holds it there by his cock but not for long. I don’t even come up gasping.

  * * *

  The closet is wide open. The ex-Ranger is in a bad mood.

  “I brought these back from over there,” he says.

  He has human fingers in a Ziploc bag on his lap. They are dehydrated and bony. After a long moment I put my hand on his knee.

  “I wish I had the first dick I sucked for money. I should have cut it off as a souvenir. I wasn’t thinking.”

  He puts his hand on my knee.

  * * *

  He looks up at me from my pussy and wipes his hand down his naked face. His head is shaved, too. It’s new.

  “Hooah,” I say.

  “It’s fucking hot,” the ex-Ranger says.

  * * *

  I’m adult enough to know that if I painted over the man on my ceiling he would just come back.

  * * *

  In yoga, in the fetal position, I stare at the back of the TODAY girl. In the locker room I feel awkward. I give her the opportunity to ignore me instead of the other way around. She puts her hand around my wrist. I smile. I think I was overthinking. I should ask her to brunch and maybe we can argue about the suicidal poet.

  “Hey.”

  “How much do you cost?” she says.

  * * *

  I give her the lesbian discount. I lace up my running shoes on the couch in her apartment. I was overthinking.

  “It’s always today.”

  “It is,” the TODAY girl says.

  * * *

  “If you’re getting too fucked-up you’re supposed to ask the guy for a vodka soda with two straws. That’s code so the bartender knows to fill a glass with just seltzer. Strip-club secrets,” I say.

  The bartender laughs.

  “Let me get a vodka soda with one straw,” I say.

  “Coming up.”

  The guy who buys me things eats a large handful of peanuts. He speaks to me when the bartender moves away.

  “When are you going to disappear for a year? I want to know.”

  “Not yet. Maybe never,” I say.

  * * *

  I fix the junk-bond guy’s eyebrows.

  “Three weeks is a long time. You’re going to get sick of me,” I say.

  “It’s going to be the best vacation I’ve ever had and I’ve been to Bora-Bora.”

  “Ooh.”

  “Twice,” he says.

  I give him both dimples.

  * * *

  The gynecologist puts lube on two of her fingers.

  “This is my hand,” she says.


  I feel the surge of affection I always feel for the stranger who notifies me before jamming part of himself or herself inside of me. She feels for my uterus and ovaries and the strings of my IUD. After the little boy tried to drown me and I saved myself, in the public pool on the far side of Peter Cooper Village, my mother apologized to his mother on behalf of me, for crying and making a scene. It reminds me of when I said I was sorry for my own blood on the sidewalk, suddenly.

  “Perfect,” she says.

  46

  I smear sour cream on a cheese pierogi.

  “I’ll probably never go to Poland,” I say.

  “I hope I never do again.”

  The blue woman is sitting across the table from me.

  “I’m happy you’re still alive.”

  “Either way,” she says.

  “I have a really nice mattress and box spring. It’s from Bloomingdale’s. Do you want it or not?”

  * * *

  I go to Sixth Avenue to look for the Polish magazine seller. He’s not there. I wanted to buy that magazine from him for two dollars, final offer, and then throw it away. I’m not Polish or Russian or Slavic in any way.

  * * *

  I’m hugging the calf’s brain guy.

  “Do you do it different for every man or do you always do the same shit?”

  He’s grabbing one cheek of my ass in one of his hands.

  “Different, but just a little bit,” I say.

  Against my leg I feel his hard dick.

  * * *

  The art guy is finally on his art trip, which was not in a few weeks but a month. Of course he has no regard for my schedule. I don’t know what to do with myself. I take the train to Queens.

  “It’s Tuesday,” the ex-Ranger says.

  “I know.”

  * * *

  As a lover when you don’t care everything comes out right. I curl around the ex-Ranger and bury my face in the back of his T-shirt while he jerks off. I press on his perineum and his balls jump in my hand.

  “I can’t come. My dick’s totally numb,” he says.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  * * *

  “I’d like to go over to your apartment. See how you live,” the ex-Ranger says.

  “No, you wouldn’t. I do in-calls there.”

  Where his leg is touching mine I feel his hurt but only for a second before it’s muffled by heroin. I look at his closet from our cocoon on the futon. I think those fingers make everything easier.

  “What are you going to do with your arsenal?”

  The ex-Ranger’s holding his hands up in the air, with his thumbs linked, but he’s not looking at them.

  “Probably nothing,” he says.

  * * *

  He night-sweats and I can’t stand it. I imagine him covered head to toe in blood that’s not his. I cringe to the far edge of the futon but his arm reaches out and finds me. I let him seep over me.

  * * *

  In the morning I walk on his back. Everywhere it cracks. He’s a killer, that’s who he is. He’s just an echo of the Sheikh, not a new pattern. That’s who he is, too.

  * * *

  The ex-Ranger and I sit on a bench in a park in Queens. We aren’t bickering. We’re in the soft center part and we can’t keep our eyes open.

  “I do love you,” I say.

  “I do love you, too,” he says.

  In the future we don’t exist.

  * * *

  He runs his thumb under my crocodile nails.

  “You’re going to stay tonight, too, and forever,” the ex-Ranger says.

  With his shaved head I think he looks nothing like the Sheikh or the man who lived in the Riis Houses on Avenue D. We’re standing on the street outside the cop bar and he’s holding my hand like I’m a lady.

  “Baby, you and me are just fantasy,” I say.

  * * *

  I go home, even though it’s Wednesday night, because I want to sleep on my padded mattress and box spring one last time more than I want to stay with him on his thin futon. Of course I never do in-calls at my apartment. This place is mine.

  * * *

  I leave prints on the office bathroom mirror of the guy who buys me things. I curl my fingers into my palms immediately.

  “Where’s your Windex?”

  He’s washing his dick in the sink.

  “I have no idea,” he says.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy comes back to our bench with lemon ice but I don’t want to eat it.

  “Everything I do for you,” he says.

  “If I don’t ask for something I don’t want it,” I say.

  He throws the plastic spoon at the fountain. This is in Manhattan, in Washington Square Park, and we’re bickering. In the future we don’t exist either. I try to picture the last man who called me by the name I gave the junk-bond guy and I can’t.

  * * *

  In Dubai even the Russian girls thought I was Russian. I decided to accept the fake look of my face. I only used Slavic diminutives of my real name so I had to rotate them. There was one I reserved for the men who didn’t have to pay—for my boyfriends like the ex-Ranger and for the Sheikh.

  47

  I wake up burning myself on the floor of my apartment.

  “Jesus fuck,” I say.

  I flick the hot cherry off my leg into the iced-coffee cup I’m using for an ashtray. It fizzles in the black water. Sometimes it’s like I’ve learned nothing in my life.

  * * *

  By the twenty-first course I’ve run out of shiny conversation. I lay my hand inside of his.

  “I wish we didn’t have to eat.”

  “You make me so unhappy. You make me feel worse than 2008,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  I stare at a teaspoon of blinding pink sherbet.

  “You haven’t punched me in a while,” I say.

  “What’s the point?”

  * * *

  On the art guy’s computer screen he’s wearing a checkered kaffiyeh.

  “One girl’s Israeli, the other’s Palestinian,” he says.

  “It’s like your cock’s the one-state solution.”

  He laughs giddily. I pull him by the belt to me.

  “I make you feel good, not bad, right, baby?”

  Now I’m wearing the kaffiyeh. He’s wrapped it around my neck.

  “Baby, you’re all icing,” the art guy says.

  I throw the scarf over my head to cover my hair.

  “Tell me everything about Tel Aviv. How was the Middle East?”

  * * *

  “Fuck my mother,” the ex-Ranger says.

  “Fuck my mother,” I say.

  “Fuck my father.”

  “Fuck my father.”

  “Fuck my sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  We’re drinking. I’m sneeringly talking to him like he’s one of them, like I’m charging him. That makes everything easier, too. The sun is coming up.

  “Fuck you,” he says.

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  * * *

  I text the delivery guy from the futon.

  “FUK QUEENS,” DG texts.

  * * *

  The wax lady tosses baby powder on my vagina.

  “It’s good you came today.”

  “I feel good about it, too,” I say.

  “I have to go to Brazil tomorrow, my father passed away.”

  One of her latex hands is on my stomach. I put my hand on top of it and press it to me.

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  “I’m trying to picture you in black.”

  She laughs. She points at the black trash bag I brought her.

  “Please, I can’t take the clothes. They’re too beautiful.”

  “Why not? They’re all white,” I say.

  * * *

  I made an Emirati feast using only his hot plate. It took hours. He took the first bite and I was full of apprehension. I put a bite in my mouth, too, but it was lik
e I couldn’t taste it until I heard his verdict on a dish he hadn’t taught me.

  “Baby. Where did you learn to make machboos?”

  “From the Internet,” I said.

  He looked at me skeptically.

  “Pretty good. Too much turmeric,” the Sheikh said.

  He ate it for days until it was finished.

  * * *

  By the register I try on a series of increasingly expensive sunglasses.

  “Do I make you unhappy?”

  The guy who buys me things doesn’t answer me. He turns the price tag dangling delicately by my ear. He speaks to the salesgirl.

  “Do these cost the most? The ones she has on? They’re the ones she wants. It doesn’t matter if she likes them or not.”

  * * *

  On Mott Street at a bubble tea café we eat sweet potato fries with sugar on them. I choke on a tapioca ball. It flies up the fat straw straight into my esophagus. Throughout my coughing fit the junk-bond guy has a lack of panic on his face.

  “Don’t drink so fast,” he says.

  “I don’t care if you’re happy,” I say.

  I can barely talk. I have no air.

  “I can’t understand anything you’re saying,” the junk-bond guy says.

  Out of all of them I think of him as my last choice.

  48

  “In one second the sun emits more energy than has ever been made in the entire history of humanity, did you know that?” I say.

  The delivery guy looks in my eyes, at my pupils.

  “Shit’s fire, right?”

  We’re sitting on the floor. My coffee table is gone and my couch and my mattress and box spring. I have been sleeping on a bed of faux-fur coats.

  “When they delivering your new furniture?” the delivery guy says.

  “They said fifteen minutes like three days ago.”

  He laughs. That’s what he always texts: “15 MIN.” I squeeze his arm. I buy eight bricks and every bag says DONT HURT EM.

  “I did that for you special,” he says.

  * * *

  I text the calf’s brain guy a picture of my fingers entwined on a bed of fake fur with the message, “Do you remember how gushing wet I was when you broke the little one?” He does not reply.

  * * *

  I drag the trash bag I brought with me into the center of the salon.

  “For the ladies,” I say.

  It’s my black clothes because I only want to wear red. They open it and squeal. I have made them totally happy. I’m distracted. I look at the nail girl.