Everyone in my house was asleep, so I kept the volume on my stereo low and I kept my ear next to the speaker as the phone rang. Someone at the radio station picked up and asked if I would please hold—I said yes and waited. Nick played his friend’s band’s song, which I don’t remember, and then they started letting callers talk to Nick. Then came call after call of mocking disgust and hate and accusing him of being gay, until the DJ would have to cut the caller off. About five calls in, I heard the DJ and my phone say the same thing: Hello, you’re on the air with Nick Carter.
My adrenaline was pumping hard. I didn’t know how to say what I actually wanted to say, which was, Will you tell Brian that I love him? I was old enough to know that was impolite, so I settled on a breathless I just wanna say … that I love you and Brian. I was at your concert tonight, and it was amazing. The DJ and Nick laughed and thanked me, then asked me what I thought of the song they played. I could barely hear them over my own heartbeat, so I misheard them as asking what I thought of the concert, and I said, I was dancing the whole time. They laughed and thanked me again and hung up.
I lay in my dark room with the radio still playing, but I wasn’t listening. Having just seen the Backstreet Boys play to a sea of girls, and mentally multiplying that by the number of cities I knew they’d toured in, Brian had started to feel farther away than usual. But now I’d brought him closer again. Nick would tell Brian that I loved him, and then he’d know.
The next day, I called to tell Casey what had happened, since Nick was her favorite. She didn’t believe me, but I’d recorded the conversation onto a cassette tape for exactly this reason, so I played it to her over the phone. Did you hear that? I asked her. Yes. Wow, she said calmly. I hadn’t expected her to be jealous, but I understood it then. I saved the tape for myself and played it over and over and over again.
* * *
In the 1982 German horror film Der Fan, Simone is a high school girl who falls in love with a famous pop star, known to the world only as R. She writes love letters to him constantly and devotes her life to waiting for a response from him. We see her leaving the dinner table without eating, isolating herself, and running out of class, unable to focus on anything but R. I’m in my room listening to your latest record, she writes in one of her letters. It’s wonderful, lovelier than the loveliest dream. It’s as if you wrote it especially for me. It’s as if we’ve known each other all our lives and shared every moment. I know you understand me better than anyone and I understand you. I know we’ve been together in our hearts from the beginning of time. Why is fate keeping us apart like this?
Simone is beautiful like a model but ignores the affections of a male classmate—at one point, she tosses aside a cassette tape he gives her. She only wants R, and, in a letter, asks him to wink at her on a television show so that she’ll know he received her letter. After getting in a fight with her parents, she is unable to watch the whole performance, so she writes another letter: All you have to write is one word: “yes,” and I’ll come to you like a shot.
When my high school photography teacher assigned a portrait project, I asked Adam, a nineteen-year-old I was infatuated with. Sure, I’ll be your model, he said, the way he said everything: as if he looked forward to breaking my heart. He wasn’t my boyfriend by any means, but he always said yes to me, and then he’d find a way to make it difficult—he’d complain, show up late, cancel at the last minute. One time he offered to take me to Lollapalooza and then just never showed up. No one had ever driven me insane in this way. I was in my room next to my lime-green phone, waiting for an explanation to light up my life. My hope kept me alive, as it did with so many things then. I was sure that Adam would arrive at any moment and we’d go, and I’d forgive him, and we’d have the best time. As the hours passed, I cried and raged with the heat of my realization, but I reacted privately. And because I wasn’t witnessed, I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t imagined myself. I’d have to see him again so he could know what I knew: that I’d rather die than be ignored.
Adam’s house was in the middle of the desert, in Scottsdale, about forty-five minutes north of my parents’ house. There were no streetlights where he lived—a surefire sign that everyone in the neighborhood was wealthy. The dirt road was bumpy and felt like work. One time, I encountered a wild white horse standing in the middle of the road, and we stared at each other for so long I thought I might have entered another world. And maybe I had: a world where my parents could only reach me by phone, a world where I was alone with a man who had his own house in the middle of nowhere. My driver’s license and my curiosity were the only things I needed, so they were the only things I took. One night, Adam and I watched Silence of the Lambs lying on our sides. When the girls cried out from their pit, Adam asked, What do I have to do to kiss you? and I said, You only have to turn me over.
Adam claimed to own his own island, but when I asked to see photos of it, he said he’d never been there. I chose to believe the lie because the lie was beautiful. Once, I drove us to a Wendy’s parking lot, and we dipped french fries into a chocolate Frosty as he talked about the island. If he invented enough details, he could believe in it, too.
I used to call Adam after he got drunk—the calls lasted longer that way. He’d usually complain about other women and then say something like, That’s why you’re better. What he meant was, You’re younger—I hadn’t had time to ruin anyone yet. I liked that he was older but had nothing of value to pass on, nothing to teach me. It was a relief to never receive advice.
I didn’t love him but I was fascinated by him, which did feel like love at first. He’d kiss me and say, Like this. He’d approach me at a party and say, You. A small amount of affection sustained me for weeks. I’d wonder how I’d accessed that one part of him and then I’d become desperate to access it again.
In my high school darkroom, I developed the photos I’d taken of Adam. I’d photographed different parts of his body, different angles of his face. It was a relief to finally be able to worship him in private. The laboriousness of developing the film felt good, as if I was doing a job. I’d been told all my life that I’d get what I wanted as long as I worked hard enough. So I worked on Adam—studying him, arranging his body in tubs of chemicals. I used tongs to submerge the paper deep enough to develop. At first, the paper was white. Then, suddenly, it was him.
* * *
In Der Fan, Simone stands outside a television studio, waiting for R to arrive. She still hasn’t received a response to her letters, but her hope keeps her alive. Then R drives up, and fans surround the car as he signs autographs. Simone stands twenty feet away, far from the crowd, just staring at him. He seems to feel her gaze on him and he looks up to meet it, then approaches her. Simone’s eyes widen; she’s in shock. Don’t you want an autograph? R asks her. No response. Tell me, what’s your name, then? No response. Well, you had your chance.
But as R walks away, Simone faints, and when she wakes up, she is lying down inside the television studio, and R is sitting beside her, holding her hand. She looks at his eyes and then their hands, as if to determine whether or not she’s dreaming, and then back at his eyes, staying silent. She has reached him without uttering a word.
I was hired as a sales associate at a twenty-four-hour FedEx Kinko’s, which meant I spent most of my after-school hours taking new print orders or ringing people up for their completed orders. The people I worked with were bizarre—one guy grew up in the circus; one girl was nocturnal; my boss didn’t exercise because he believed humans were born with a predetermined number of heartbeats and he didn’t want to waste his. Sometimes men would call and breathe heavily into the phone, getting off on my surprise, but mostly people wanted to know things like how to make a single black-and-white copy of their driver’s license. It was an easy job, and I did it well.
There was a section of the store called the “office center” where you could plug your laptop in and work, but it was very rarely used. Then, a couple months after I started my job, I no
ticed a man who had begun working there every day for several hours. His workstation was about five feet to the left of my register and separated from it only by a glass partition. I don’t know how long he had been watching me when I first noticed it—had I ignored days of this? I felt his gaze, I turned to meet it, and he looked away. It went on like this for weeks: I’d come in for my shift after school; he’d come in shortly after I arrived and leave shortly before I left. He was in his midthirties, with red, acne-scarred skin and a stiff walk. He didn’t appear to be doing any work, and he wasn’t making any copies, but there was no way to ask him to leave because he was technically allowed to sit there as long as he wanted. No one else seemed to give him any thought.
A few weeks later, I rode my bike to a Barnes & Noble near my school before going home. I sat down at a table with a magazine, but after about twenty minutes, I felt the urge to look up. There, half behind a bookshelf, I saw the man from my job watching me. When my eyes met his, he turned. I got up and walked toward him, not sure what I would say if he stopped, but he didn’t stop—he walked straight out of the store. I followed him outside and stood near the entrance while he unlocked his car door. The only way for him to leave was to drive past me, so that’s what he did, looking straight at me. I looked back at him, so he would know that I knew. I wrote down his license plate number because it seemed like the only thing I could do.
After that, I told my parents what had happened and what had been happening, and they called the police. An officer came over to file a report, and he sat in the rocking chair that my mother had used to breastfeed me and my sister when we were babies. The chair creaked with his weight; I could see his gun underneath the armrest. I had cried on my bike ride home from the bookstore, convinced I was doomed, that the man was probably watching me from his car at that very moment, finding out where I lived, plotting my intricate kidnapping or my murder, but with the cop there, I felt calm and stoic. I also felt like a celebrity being interviewed. When did you first notice him? Does he always watch you when you’re at work?
I didn’t have the right details for everything I’d seen—I could explain most of the where and the when, but not the feeling (that old female word) that something was wrong. I looked at the gun on the cop’s hip again—it felt odd to see it so accessible, so ready. I thought of the word order, because it seemed as if the questions were part of a routine, and that the routine might keep me safe.
But there was nothing that he could do, not even with a license plate number. Without a direct threat, he explained that I’d have to wait it out. I asked, Wait for what? and he said, For him to do something that gives you a reason to call 911. He said I should keep going to work but that I shouldn’t be alone in public anymore or ride my bike anywhere. He prescribed these things like medicine, like something easy to take.
My parents told my boss, and my boss asked that I come in to go over old security footage. That way, we could find an image of him and point him out to the other employees. We sat in his office with the tinted windows in the back of the store and went through tape after tape—I couldn’t remember the last day I’d seen him. There! I said. That’s him, but I hadn’t realized my boss didn’t have a tape in the VCR. That’s the live footage, he said, and we turned, and we could see him, but he couldn’t see us. My boss hurried to put a blank tape in the machine and pressed the red Record button so we could keep him.
I stayed in the office for about a half hour, until he lost interest and left. The other employees were briefed on the situation and, over the next few days, as I went back to work, they began watching him back. There was still no legitimate reason to kick him out. Every day he’d sit there and stay silent and watch me complete my dull tasks: pressing buttons, giving change.
Then, one day, he packed up and began to leave, but this time he paused halfway to the door and looked back at me—something he’d never done before. I stood still, focusing on him, waiting for something to happen. The fluorescent lights and the copiers hummed around us like a cicada song. My body had evolved to read his. I could tell he was never coming back, and he never did.
Simone, in R’s bed: But I thought you needed me?
I felt calm, in control, older. Nothing could touch me, and nobody did. Later that night, I placed a man’s driver’s license facedown on a copy machine while a bright green laser scanned his face, then my arm, so that the printed copy documented both of us. That’s okay, he said, I only need this part. I thought about my part, the movie I was writing in my head. Could I be the star? Admiration was part of that answer, instinct was another. I learned one new language each day.
Swollen and Victorious
Hands are unbearably beautiful.
They hold on to things. They let things go.
—MARY RUEFLE, “The Cart”
1. The Heart Line
Wanna see my hand? a woman asked me as I walked alone—but it wasn’t a question, just a way of showing it to me there on the street in the middle of the night. Sure enough, bloody, parts of it were dry but it was a new thing, like a prize.
On that street in Brooklyn, it was wise to not talk to anyone, not look anyone in the eye, be as invisible as possible, walk faster the later it was. The cold deterred some people, but then you knew for sure the figures you did see would have something to show you—a knife, a smile that glowed in the dark, a hand that’s been somewhere.
It’s really bad; see? Another question that didn’t mean anything. She was walking with me now—her hand looked redder under the deli’s neon sign, but hell if I was going to open a dialogue in twenty degrees. The weather had been so unreliable that week, I kept dressing wrong—it was T-shirt weather one day, parka the next. Funny how even those of us who want to die care about dressing for the day. This was one of those weeks I wanted to die, but not from exposure—something more glamorous. Something holy or ugly. I felt I could get this right.
So many people need no encouragement; they just stay with you, dead or not—like this woman presenting her awful hand. What am I supposed to do with that—invite her into my home and give her a Band-Aid? Sympathize? Tell her that the last time I was bleeding in the street, I asked for it?
I found the wildest guy I knew—we’d known each other in another town but we were both in Brooklyn now, both lonely now. I ate one meal per day now: a twelve-inch turkey sandwich with everything on it from the place with the neon sign under the J train. That’s all I could afford, and it kept me full, but then I’d drink whiskey at night and become feral.
Come on, hit me, I said. Don’t be a pussy. Hit me in the face. Even my weakness sounded strong sometimes. He laughed hard, knowing he was about to hit a girl, maybe for the first time ever, who would do that? I guess anyone who looked at me too long with my begging face shining like the moon would do that. I’d always wanted to know what it felt like—in Tucson I’d loved men who believed violence was the answer, and they hit each other until they got it right. One time I saw a man go down in the alley behind the diner and, later, I held the hand that hit him. It was so big I had to use both of my hands to cradle it—swollen and victorious, I’d said.
And then I’d convinced my friend to really punch me—a fist coming toward me, across my nose. I said Ow because I thought it would hurt, my voice came in before my body felt anything, Ow, isn’t that what people said when they got hit? I saw stars, actual cartoon stars, and they were beautiful even then, not just now in my memory. How many things are beautiful in the moment you experience them? I fell to the ground and he was laughing above me, asking if I was okay, touching the blood from my nose.
I started laughing then, too, remembering we were in public with so many windows that could’ve been looking. Joy, I just remember thinking. When had I last felt that? Children feel joy, right? They must. They can’t just whine about justice all day long—what’s fair. Who gets what. Blah blah. I loved being an adult and being broke but living. I had so little, but all of it was mine: my leather jacket, my unlimited MetroCard,
my shelf of books that seemed like clues.
I knew my friend would do whatever I asked of him, so I only asked for things I really wanted, like dinner with me at my apartment a few months prior. We split a can of potato soup diluted with milk, and then we made a salad with romaine lettuce, red onion, and croutons. He put olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper on it; that was it. Tastes like summer, I said, and I closed my eyes and listened to the radiator clicking away behind us. It was great the way we never kissed and still got what we wanted, or at least I did. I never felt lonely as a child; social things were always someone else’s idea. But try having your first real adult birthday alone with your ex-boyfriend who pities you and then you’ll get it. I did.
Can we go inside? my sister asked, and it wasn’t until then I realized she had been there the whole time—watched me get hit, fall back, laugh hard. She was on the steps, numb from witnessing how I acted when no one was looking. But she was looking, the windows were looking; I just forgot about the world sometimes. She’d come into town to sleep in my bed and see a show and here I was, giving her everything. The three of us went upstairs, behind closed doors, but my friend and I weren’t done—we’d removed something from each other and then we couldn’t put it back. He grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and chased after me—I laughed so hard I fell to the ground in the hallway. He pinned me down and put the knife to my throat while my sister closed the door to my room. You can’t do anything now, can you? One of those questions that’s more of a comment. I laughed because I couldn’t believe how much he loved me. What a person. It’s so rare you just look at someone and think: what a person. Our loneliness went out with our breath, but then we had no choice but to breathe it back in.
The knife stayed on my throat for I don’t know how long. We needed a prop to act well, to manufacture a storm that swallowed us both, to bleed through my nose and remember, remember turning a year older and wanting to go backward or forward, anywhere but now, here, asking my friend, Can we go somewhere? He didn’t answer because he didn’t have to; the city went quiet and soft and no one bled and no one died and no one had a sister and no one had a friend and no one looked out of their window and no one ever witnessed anyone else.
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