by Michelle Tea
There’s Fish, I said. I was a little concerned.
Even better, Rose said. Her voice had moved closer, was right in my ear. Even more fantastic. I wish we could take them too.
I dropped off the bridge with a substantial splash. The fish darted like startled cats, but there wasn’t anywhere for them to go. The pool was dammed up with rocks, phony or real. The fish were stuck with me, they bumped softly against my calves as I stooped to scoop the spare change. We were stealing the wishes of bunches of people. Quickly I had two palmfuls of nothing but quarters. Why toss a quarter when a penny would do? These were rich-people wishes. I felt fine about taking them. Maybe they’d generously wished that poor people got more money and now I was helping their dreams come true. I brought the coins, dripping, over to the bridge, where Rose stood with the wide mouth of the backpack unzipped and ready. I dumped the money inside and went back for more. I reached down into the water and petted one of the fish as it glided past, its long fishy whiskers trailing from its face. I don’t think the fish minded me in their space. The people who worked there, though, were pissed.
What are you doing? a lady hollered at me. I figured she worked there because she was wearing a Chinese-style blouse, brilliant red with little loopy buttons angling up the side. It was really pretty. There were birds and tree branches printed across it. I smiled at her. What are you doing? she repeated. It was so obvious what I was doing. My hands were cupping a pile of silver, water streaming from between my fingers. This would be the last scavenge. The coins slid from my hands into the bag, which Rose had zipped before the angry lady strode up the bridge. You can’t do that! she hollered. Her whole face was collapsing toward the center in a massive earthquake of a frown. I was trapped in the pool. I’d been relying on Rose to help pull me back onto the bridge but now Rose was clutching the backpack to her chest and trying to angle past the lady. The lady was blocking her way and demanding she hand over the backpack. The lady was speaking into a little walkie-talkie thingie that had been clamped to the waist of her slacks. She honked into it and it sputtered back and soon there was another lady in an identical pretty red shirt emerging from the restroom hallway, the Yikes bottle we’d drained in the bathroom in one hand and my flops in the other. Shit. I hadn’t meant to be such a littering slob, I just didn’t have my head too together after what Rose had done to me. My downstairs parts still felt pretty crazy from it, actually. Central, cracked open, transmitting and receiving. It was now the satellite dish of my body.
Rose tried to slip past the angry lady and the angry lady put her hand on Rose’s shoulder, stopping her. When Rose slapped the woman’s hand away I knew I had to figure a way out of the river, fast. Rose’s face slunk right up close to the woman’s face, Rose got all up in her face and started hollering all sorts of terrible words at the woman, the kind of words that boy was hollering at us earlier. Rose’s face was as close to this woman as it had been to mine in the bathroom. I knew that the woman was smelling the Yikes fumes on Rose’s breath, and the cigarettes like burnt peanuts under that. I could hide under the bridge and hope nobody noticed. I could hurl myself up and over the bridge but I was pretty sure I’d break something in the process, and if the women descended on me I’d have no chance. The second woman, holding our stuff, seemed scared to go to her coworker’s aid. That’s ’cause Rose was so scary. Her voice was loud; it rang through the extravagant restaurant. The diners were further down the river and couldn’t see the commotion. The river, where I stood, was fenced in with large faux rocks and shrubbery, but down where the people sat eating there was nothing hemming it in, and so I splashed in that direction, over the rocky miniature breakwater and into the stream, my feet trampling so much change it was hard not to bend down and sift a bit as I scrambled. I headed toward a table with a flaming centerpiece. It looked like a fake volcano, and there were piles of greasy fingerfoods heaped around its base. The man and the woman at the table stared at me, horrified. I lumbered toward them like the Swamp Thing. I was all splashed up, my raggy shorts soaked through and my T-shirt damp and clinging obscenely. My hair dripped into my eyes. The couple had stopped snacking, the woman held a chicken wing at boob-level, her lipsticked mouth catching flies. She looked at the man desperately. The man looked confused. His tan looked like the result of some accidental poisoning, a too-bright orangey shade. The lady too. They both looked like the chicken wing trembling in the lady’s claw. I’m Real Sorry About This, I said as I approached. Other diners had noticed my arrival and were swiveling around in their seats. In order to get out I needed to steady myself on something and all there was was that table with its volcano of food. I put my wet hands beside it and felt it wobble as I leaned on it, up and out of the river. Thanks A Lot, I said.
Really! the chicken woman huffed. She craned her neck around for someone who could do something. There was a waiter holding a tray he’d just unloaded, looking at me with the same bland bewilderment everyone else was. If I were Rose I’d have had some stylish, slightly shocking exit to make but I just hopped away from the water and ran back toward the entrance. Rose was still tangoing with the angry lady, but their fight had moved from the bridge and was now located directly under the dragons. I swooped in like something out of a movie, and knocked the mad woman back so hard she banged into its tail. I grabbed Rose. She still had the backpack, clutched to her chest so tight her fingers looked skinless, pure knobby bone.
Yeah! I hooted, steering Rose toward the door. She was off balance but I kept her moving and she got her footing and dashed ahead of me, swinging open the giant glass doors. We’re Sorry! I yelled back at the women. They were yelling at each other now and that one still had my flip flops.
Twenty-four
It took us forever to make our way through the giant Chinese restaurant’s even more giant parking lot. The paved car platter seemed as big as the whole town of Mogsfield, stuffed with bulbous and turd-shaped SUVs, teensy compact thingies huddling close to the ground like spacebugs, an occasional beater with rusty corner and patchwork paint jobs, all gleaming under the lights hung from tall poles. I knew we weren’t safe from the angry women in the quilted ruby tops until we were seriously off their property, so we ran like crazy, not speaking, not even looking at each other. Rose was in front of me, moving fast in her shabby sneakers, our stolen treasure of quarters banging around inside the backpack. I could hear their jangle as loud as the smack of her worn rubber soles on the lot’s pebbly surface. It wasn’t until we were out on the side of Route 1, catching our breath in the repetitive glare of the constant cars, that I realized I’d sliced up my foot. It felt wet, but I thought it was just from the river, from the streaming drips of my soggy outfit, but then it felt sore and when I looked down I could tell it was blood, darkly pooling out from my poor naked foot. Oh, Crap, I said. I leaned against the pole of a highway sign and pulled my foot up into my hands. It was too bloody to see what was going on in there, and the longer I stopped and breathed and observed the wound the more it hurt. It had its own living pulse, like my downstairs parts, only rotten. My foot was all smeary blood plus a good coating of grime from the parking lot.
We need a first aid kit, Rose said. We need water, a bathroom. Fuck. Sit down. I did as she said. I came down hard on the pavement, my body suddenly shaky again. Rose was fiddling with her nightgown. She found the little tear one of the Yikes caps had put in the gauzy outer layer. She took it and gave it a hard rip, widening the hole, and kept tearing it in a long circle around her body. She was unraveling herself. With her teeth she tore the last stubborn bit free, and the ring of fabric drifted to the ground. Wispy hairs of shredded gauze undulated over the nylon.
Rose crouched before me. She lifted my sad foot onto her knobby knees and blotted at the blood with an edge of torn nightgown. She took the strip and wrapped it around the gash, pulling it snug around the ball of my foot and tying it in a bow above my toes. The tightness felt good, seemed to contain the raw pulse. We still need help, she said. Let’s see where we c
an go next. Can you walk?
Yeah, Sure, I said. That’s Great, Thank You So Much. A dull breeze hit the bow and flopped it around. Rose had taken my battered foot and replaced it with this adorable gift-foot. I wished my other foot got banged up too. I wished I had another bleeding part of myself to offer to Rose, for her to hold in her clammy palms and return it to me blotted and unbroken and topped with a girly shred of her own self.
Here, wait, she said and unzipped the backpack. She futzed around inside and came back out with a sugar-coated key. I inserted it into my nose. It made me laugh.
It’s Like My Ignition, I said. I turned the key up inside my drug-crusted nose. I made revved-up motorcycle noises. My inner nose felt crystalized, like it was hung with plastic icicles, maybe sprayed with a can of that fake snow they bust out around Christmastime. It was coated in a synthetic crust. Rose cracked up at my nose-ignition gag, took the key away. I had begun to enjoy the dull sting in my sinus, same as I had begun to enjoy the accordion-throb in my downstairs, a grabby feeling, part painful, part itchy, part deeply nice. My body was teeming with sensations. Rose had inserted the key of her hand into the ignition of my downstairs and brought me to life. Even the new opening in my foot. It was like my foot had bloomed open to get closer with the world, I thought. My whole body was craving entry, it wanted to swallow the world, it wanted the world to invade my everything. Maybe I should take off the bandage and let my foot eat the concrete, swallow the pebbles, and ingest the roadside dirt. Maybe it would make me immune to urban poison. My mind was flooded with thought. The drugs had gashed open my mind, had torn it like a split foot so that all the ideas of the universe could be mashed into my head.
I Love This, I said to Rose. I Love This. My downstairs felt wild and whirling and I reached out for Rose’s head, pulled it down onto mine and kissed her. I split her mouth with my tongue like a shard of glass. I ate her mouth like I was starving. I had an urge to crush her to bits, to chomp her to pulp. I pulled away. I Feel Crazy, I said, and she smiled, she looked crazy, she said, I feel crazy too, and she fell into me on the sidewalk. We lay there all balled up like a single throbbing monster making out with itself, the roar of the cars and the parade of their headlights like disco strobes, occasionally beeping at us. We made out forever and tasted the gritty bitter granules at the back of each other’s throats, we got higher, got more fucked-up just kissing each other. I breathed the air that streamed out of her nose and she breathed the air I pushed into her lungs — we were keeping each other alive or killing each other, a suffocation machine. Eventually we sat up, pulled away. Spaced out, catching our breath, and following the whiz of vehicles before us.
Your foot, Rose said. We have to take care of it. It can’t get infected. She popped up with a wobble and held out her hand to help me stand. I didn’t take it. Rose was a stunted wisp and I’d only tumble her back onto me and then I would only kiss her again and we’d spend the next forever rolling on the side of the road, my foot getting gangrene. I shimmied upward with the help of the pole. We began our trudge down Route 1, my foot spazzing now, alive with hurt. I limped behind Rose who sometimes trotted ahead, then, remembering I was wounded, galloped back and slowed her pace, only to ramble into a sprint again. She was like one of those tiny, bouncy, Frisbee-catching dogs. I was happy to see her face every time she turned back toward me.
We heard the roar of Seamus O’Maniac’s before we reached it. Seamus O’Maniac’s is a fake Irish bar, pretending to be like the true Irish bars that are all over Mogsfield and probably all over Massachusetts. Seamus O’Maniac’s is all olden on the outside, with weird knotted shapes etched onto the glass and a drapey awning and four-leafed everything. A little leprechaun man leaned into the big curling S of the Seamus, little bubbles floating up and bursting around his balding red head, to convey drunkeness. WHERE EVERY DAY IS ST. PATRICK’S DAY ran beneath it, in quotes. As if Seamus O’Maniac himself had said it. I had once thought Seamus O’Maniac’s was just another Irish bar, but then on drives with Kristy or Donnie I spotted two or three more so I know it’s a fake. People love it anyway. The place is crammed with drunk people who are proud to be Irish. They fall out the front door and stand smoking and belligerent out front. Occasionally a dude will lift both fists in the air and go Wooo! Woooo! for no apparent reason. I was watching one dude with curly blond hair do this exact maneuver. His cigarette was bunched in the knuckles of his fist. Wooo! Woooo! Another blond guy came out the green front door and clapped him on the back. Bra! he honked. I looked at Rose. Rose was brave, Rose was an explorer, but this was pushing it. I did not want to go inside Seamus O’Maniac’s. I would hitchhike and snort strange glittering drugs and I would follow her into the cruddy skyscrapers of bloated monster drug dealers but I did not want to go inside Seamus O’Maniac’s. I imagined us being grabbed by muscly white dudes, lifted onto the bar and made to dance jigs for the amusement of the date-raping clientele.
I Don’t Know, Rose, I said. I caught a peeling bit of skin on my lip with my tooth and started chewing. A bit of skin came off in a long, dry strip. Lip jerky. It was oddly satisfying. Rose watched me.
We need gum, she said. You’re starting to chew on your face. That’s not good.
You Think We Should Go In There? I asked. I nodded toward Seamus O’Maniac’s. Some females had exited for a smoke, and now the Wooo-ing guy had a target for his noises. Woo! Woooo! he hooted at the girls. They were wearing short everything and huddling closely as if for warmth. Their bouncy blond hairdos bounced against each other. Wooo! Wooo! they hooted back, then giggled.
It’s Like A Mating Dance, I said. Like You See On TV, On Nature Programs. With Animals. Rose’s face was stuck on the scene.
No, no, we can’t go in there, she said. We won’t make it past the bouncer anyway, but even if we did we’d never make it out alive. I want to go there. She pointed at a storefront some doors down from Seamus O’Maniac’s. It was overshadowed by the hoopla from the bar, but a blue neon sign in the window burned tattoo. By its pale light I could make out the sign above the door, 777. Rose strut toward it and I hobbled pathetically after her. She pushed the glass door open, tinkling a bell. Hey! she hollered. I came in as the woman behind the counter looked up. She looked tired. She had a tense, wooden face with blue eyes that seemed extra alive compared to her skin. Maybe it was her makeup that made her skin look hard and dull. She looked dusted with fake color. Her lemony hair was shaggy and angular and poking out in different bed-heady directions. It had that fried look Kristy said came from too much bleach. She had a raspberry-colored T-shirt on, with a collar that V’d down into her cleavage. Her dark jeans had a faint sparkle and were cuffed high. She had a few tattoos on her arms but not as many as you’d expect for a person working in a tattoo shop.
Can I help you? she asked. Her mouth warbled the question in a half-yawn.
My friend, Rose pointed to the ratty bow on my bound-up foot. She hurt her foot. Do you have first aid here?
What, did you cut it? the lady asked. She seemed deeply bored. Maybe she had been sleeping.
Yeah, I nodded. I walked across the linoleum to the counter. The counter was piled with black-covered books. The walls around us were hung with billions of tattoo designs. Roses and dragons and geisha ladies, fairies and unicorns and clusters of objects all bunched together, like guns twined with thorny vines and then a woman’s spread legs rising up behind them. There were flags and cartoon characters, panthers and mermaids and even hula girls. Hearts with empty banners.
Wow. Rose was sort of twirling around, trying to take it all in at the same time. Whoa. She revolved like a fucked-up ballerina in a cranked-up jewelry box. The woman smirked.
You’re going to make yourself dizzy, she said. Come back here and I’ll get the first aid kit. She pulled open a waist-high swinging door and we herded through. The back had more of the colorful tattoo drawings tacked everywhere, plus a giant leathery chair like from a barber shop or a dentist’s office. Sit, she said to me, and pointed to t
he chair. It had its bottom up, recliner-style, and I let myself collapse into it. My heart rattled inside my chest like a washing machine with a heavy load.
Rose dropped our backpack to the floor and studied the walls. The place had a sharp, clean smell. I could sniff out a faint medicine stink beneath it. I thought it was great lucky fortune that we had found a tattoo parlor of all places. A place where people went to willingly get their skin all punched up with millions of tiny holes would of course be able to help my foot. The woman came out with a small lunchbox. It had a red cross on it and looked like a toy doctor’s kit. She bent down and lifted my foot. She held it in her hand and inspected it like it was a hideous gift, all wrapped up and topped with a dingy bow. Nice job, she tugged the fucked-up bandage. Her stumpy, square fingers began undoing the knotted gauze. With every rough tug the cut pulsed. It was like it was hollering out inside my head, the terrible scream of a wounded foot. You do this? She gave Rose a smile. It was a tight crack across her face, it seemed to hurt her to do it. Rose was totally engrossed with the walls. She shook her head yes. You’re a regular Nurse Mercy, she said. It hurt when she pulled the fabric from my cut. The tiny web of gauze had begun to weave itself into the skin. She tugged it away gently. I winced. The woman ignored me.
Who’s Nurse Mercy? Rose asked. The woman stood, unraveled, bloody gauze dangling from her hand. She walked over to dump it into a safety-orange bin marked Biohazard. She glanced around the covered walls and finally stuck her hand out at a design.
Her. Rose of No Man’s Land. Rose moved closer to get a better look and her mouth dropped open.
I’m Rose, she said. That’s me, that’s my name. She reached out and pulled the plastic-covered sheet. The tacks that held it to the wall popped off and rolled across the floor.