The Solace of Monsters

by Laurie Blauner

  “Where did you find so many bodies?” I was stunned.

  Father flipped his hand, undid his eyepiece. “Mara, people die all the time.”

  I leaned down, touched the cold, stiff arm of a young woman in an orange dress with dark hair who lay straight as a board on top of an older woman on her side, curved into a parenthesis. “I don’t want their parts.” I was disgusted.

  “Maybe I need to try a new method,” Father was thinking out loud, “cloning or some other type of regeneration. Like this,” Father opened one of his hands in my dream and a tiny embryo, an unborn human, appeared in his palm. When he poked it with his finger to turn it over, the embryo peered at me with my face.

  I woke to a man’s flaccid penis in my face. He smelled of liquor, greasy food, urine, vomit, and other bodily functions. The zipper on his pants was open. He looked worse than Greg, disassembled on my father’s operating table. He had dirty hair and bad breath. I didn’t look that good either.

  “I bet you want this,” he wiggled his wormy penis in the air.

  He was straddling upright over me in a way I didn’t like, falling to one side or the other as though he couldn’t stay perpendicular. I brushed the hair from my face, saw he had his penis in one hand and a bottle of something in his other hand, waving both uncontrollably. “No, I don’t,” I stated, dirt flying from his scuffing feet near my face.

  “Ugh,” he stopped his tipping. “You’re butt ugly.” He smiled, and he had numerous teeth missing. “But that’s okay. I don’t need to look at no face, you know what I mean.” He winked and began pulling at my pants and clothes.

  “You’re annoying me,” I warned him. He managed to pull down my pants a bit before I sat up, knocking him aside, stretching my arms. I lay back down again.

  “Whoa, things aren’t right down there”—he was pointing at my stomach and my sexual parts—“unless I’m just too damn drunk.” He smiled his hideous smile. “Oh shit, that’s okay. I don’t care.” He rose and started fumbling with my clothes again.

  “Just stop it,” I exclaimed loudly. “I don’t want your penis.”

  “You got money?” He was kneeling over me and mumbling, “’cause I need money too.”

  Streetlights were fading and sunlight was beginning to caress the horizon. I couldn’t stand the smell of him, his dirty hands searching my clothes, the spilled liquor, his filthy penis flapping against my legs. I stood up, displacing him. He fell onto the earth with a thud; his bottle emptied as it rolled away. I arranged my clothes.

  He looked up at me. “Shit, you’re one big lady.” He sat and grabbed his bottle. He shook it. “It’s gone. See what you did. Now you owe me.” He threw the hollow bottle aside, stood next to me, his fists balled.

  “Go away,” I ordered him. “I don’t like you.”

  “Nobody tells me what the fuck to do,” he yelled. He ran at me in wobbling circles and started pounding my arms, where he could reach them.

  I was afraid he would knock more parts off of me so I picked him up by the back of his shirt. His body was hollow, empty, and lightweight. I flung him away. He hit a tree and skidded down the trunk with his eyes closed. He fell onto his side among some flowers and bushes. I went over to him, felt his pulse and checked his nostrils for breath. I checked my pants pocket for my money and it was still there. A tattered woman ran to me. She imitated my medical gestures.

  “Shit,” she said, “he’s still alive.” Her round face scurried out from her bundle of rags. She smiled. Her rotten teeth reminded me of brown butterflies shyly revealing themselves. She was dissolving into her old, raggedy clothes the same way I was losing pieces of myself. “But I like your style and I could use some protection around here.” She snuffled, wiped her nose with a torn sleeve. She looped one arm around mine. She was wearing woolen gloves. “You’re new here, ain’t you?”

  I nodded, looking around. I was in a public park. Early morning joggers and people hurrying to work were passing us by along the sidewalks. We were invisible. She, at least, smelled better than the man.

  “I’ll show you the ropes, Honey.”

  “Conspiratorial.” I gave her a word for the manner in which she was addressing me.

  The horrible man on the ground began moaning.

  “Ignore him. We call him Benjie ‘cause he’s a lot like a bad dog.” She laughed, and I thought that she might lose some of her teeth from the gasping and jerking.

  I laughed with my grinding noise, to be polite. “Maybe I should help him up?”

  “Naw,” she said, “he’ll just start bothering you again.” She stepped away from me and formally held out her purple, gloved palm. “My name’s Misty. You’ll need a name here, Hon, just so people will know you by something. You can make up whatever name you want.” She looked me up and down, “How about Crow? Your face and everything’s coming apart. You’re dark and big.” She gently patted my arm.

  “I’ll think of a name,” I told her, happy to name myself, like being too tired to wake in the morning and then suddenly discovering some energy, like being reborn.

  Benjie was hunched over a cigarette, his face scraped by the tree, the clear bottle lolling by his sad shoes. He had settled himself in the bushes and was squinting up at the tree tops, as if there was a full liquor bottle in the sky and he was figuring out how to drink the distance. Smoke circled his annoying head.

  “Screw him,” Misty said. “I’ll show you the sights in this city.” Misty scrounged in some bushes and pulled out a shopping cart filled with a baby’s green chair, a book with curled pages, bronze ballet shoes, a red long-haired wig hanging over the side. “This here’s my best friend.” She slapped the cart. “She goes where I go.”

  “I’ve been on the #18 bus and taken the subway too.” I spread out my arms and some joggers on the path ran to the other side of the road.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” She smiled her decaying apple smile. She held out her purple gloved hand. “Shake my hand and we got a deal to take care of each other.”

  I slipped my hand into her scratchy purple one and it moved up and down. “Tentative,” I gave both of us.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said.

  Chapter Ten

  The city reared up and took a hard look at me. It was an appraising city and what it saw was a large, lost girl/woman, lonely in the way solitary people can be lonely. I was a curious person who wanted to carve a chosen life amid the fumes of dust, smoke, cars, and tall buildings. Misty showed me mazes under the concrete, gaping holes that become filled with plant and human life, foul, strange places full of strangers and others who were homeless. They convened around smashed, abandoned cars, under bridges, in the backs of restaurants and department stores, under cardboard boxes, sometimes finding the occasional good luck of a decrepit building or bankrupt motel. We kept our distance from the people who were reassured and distracted in their lives, the ones going to work, busy with their children, people who couldn’t conceive of not having a home or living out of a shopping cart. We were the faces that everyone saw, but no one could remember.

  We had to leave her shopping cart in the corner of a subway stop, well-hidden underneath the stairs in Misty’s safe place, while we took a train to a beach that skirted the profile of the city. At first I thought it was a wasteland. There were no trees. Birds passed over the odd, pale stretch of glassy substance that was warm and reflected sunlight: sand at the shore. I had seen pictures. It was not at all like soil. I allowed the granules to run through my injured fingers. Suddenly I had a memory of sand, tiny grains of disintegrated and worn rock, elemental and refigured. Stones jutted out into the water, which wrinkled up into white-topped waves that ran toward the shore. Families were screaming, dipping their toes in the water, playing with balls. I didn’t understand what the beach’s purpose was. An old couch and broken bottles, along with crushed soda and beer cans, lined the edges. I smelled salt
, fish, suntan oil, sweat, and something murky and unnamable. We sat on a crumbling wall watching a hot dog vendor zigzag through the people, towels, and umbrellas. A father, fighting with his wife, was shaking his fist at his children; one was a deformed teenager, pouring water from a bucket onto her head for no apparent reason.

  I pointed her out to Misty. “Are there many people like that?” I noticed her dark hair, darting eyes, her features falling into one another. I felt my partial ear, scanned my missing fingers, remembered my severed toes, askance eyebrow. My right elbow was cracking. The girl’s mouth was distorted and she wore a questioning look on her face. Her limbs were beyond her control. But we were alike in some way I couldn’t describe.

  Misty nodded. “Enough.”

  Vagrant sunlight flew into the young girl’s face and she crossed her arms, shielded her wet cheeks. She resembled a dog, studying her family, wondering what they would do next, having no idea why anyone would do such a thing. The girl collapsed into a sitting position and continued following her parents’ argument, while the remaining bored and restless children scattered toward the water.

  “Oh, for a box of childhood,” Misty moaned as we sat, spreading out our clothes along the wall full of beach rubble. She was watching me watching the young girl.

  “I was once a Childcloud like that,” I confessed. The odd young girl was standing upright, flapping her arms as if she wanted to fly somewhere else. I wrote in my hidden notebook, Provocative.

  “I don’t know what to do with her either,” the girl’s mother screamed so loudly at the father that we could hear them clearly above the din and murmur of everyone else and the waves with their little, white slurping sounds.

  It was hot and made me think of all the various ways our bodies leave us. How thoughts passed through the body, not circumventing it, changing it. How, in the humidity and heat, another body could form.

  “My intentions are parked somewhere and you’re inside them,” Misty whispered to me.

  “I’m developing my interior,” I tried to explain to her.

  “There’s a circus in the clouds.” She pointed out over the water, and I could almost see a Ferris wheel or fluffy acrobats in the sky. She cupped her ear, hidden under her knit hat, with her purple, gloved hand, “I can hear birds barking answers.”

  “Instead of wanting to be loved, maybe now I want to love.” I was trying to be reasonable. A blossom of sunlight crawled along my sleeve.

  She turned toward a washer that was gutted and rusting behind us. “Bruises can be worn outside our clothing,” she told the machine.

  “Misty, I don’t understand what you’re saying and I keep trying.” Her head swiveled toward me.

  I was still spying on the family. The father grabbed the girl’s arms and held them close to her body. The girl was beginning to explode. She had turned red, her eyes were squinting, and her torso trembled.

  After a few minutes she screamed, “Argh” over and over.

  “Oh my God, she’s babbling again,” the mother said. Her hand slapped the girl’s mouth and then fell to her side. The girl was quiet again. They released her arms and began packing all their beach belongings.

  “C’mon kids, we’re going,” the father yelled at the other wayward children.

  “That’s because today doesn’t say the same thing it did yesterday.” Misty was talking to a large rock sitting near us on the wall. “That’s because all my meds are in my cart, which is disguised as a cloud in the hereafter. Watch out for it!”

  The family hurried away, sand spitting behind them. The mother towed the girl, holding onto her clothes, said to the father, “She’s a disaster today.”

  Misty stared at me. “You’re a refrigerator so stop talking to me.”

  Misty was making contorted faces, one after another.

  “We need to get you back to your shopping cart.” I rose. I took her arm and gently pulled her along. “I found my new name. It’s Refrigerator,” I told her.

  Misty and I retraced our steps and found her hidden shopping cart underneath the subway stairs where we had left it. I was relieved when she dug out a bottle of pills and swallowed some without water. We sat on a cement bench until her face relaxed, her breath no longer so exasperated, her heart rate slowing. It was beginning to match the arrival and departure of the hurtling trains, whose wind brushed dirt, candy wrappers, and warm air against our skin. I realized that not only was I disassembling but that people were disintegrating all around me. And neither Father nor I had anything to do with it.

  Misty smiled with her brown teeth. “Here,” Misty said, thrusting the pill bottle toward me. “You look like you could use some of these.”

  “I was . . . concerned.” I pushed the bottle away.

  “Aw, c’mon. You might as well try ‘em. I have tons.”

  My remaining eyebrow inched across my forehead. “What are they?”

  “Don’t know.” She smiled again and I had to look away. “But I feel good. Go on, try it.” She tossed one pill into my hand.

  “Just one, then we need to find someplace to sleep.”

  “The park again? Or would you like something more . . . fancy?” She was rearranging her striped scarf.

  “Cornucopia,” I gave her.

  Misty rolled her eyes. “Did you take it?”

  “Yes, I swallowed it. I’ve taken a large assortment of pills in my past.”

  “Do you have any of them now?”

  “No. I haven’t had any operations recently.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  A bone in my wrist appeared to be floating around the river of my forearm. “The same as everyone.”

  “Oh.” Misty spied something under a bench at the subway station. It was a small pillow, losing its stuffing and embroidered with a white cat on the front. “What a treasure!” she screeched.

  “Equivocal,” I gave her.

  She studied me, tucking the pillow under the red wig draped on her cart.

  “Pugnacious,” I tried. She appeared flummoxed. We weren’t speaking the same language. “Why can’t two human representatives communicate?” I thought of Gloves and how we had managed to understand each other, using gestures. I tried to describe the word by punching at the air. I could feel a tiny bone crack into pieces under my left shoulder, which fell slightly down and forward. It hurt for a moment, then the pain flew away.

  Misty stepped away from me and threw her arms into the air. Her raggedy sleeves hung down and swayed. She crossed her arms over her face as though I was going to hit her. “You’re a freaking disaster.”

  A police officer sauntered into our dark corner. I could feel the metal-filled breeze as trains and people came and went. I could taste and smell all of humanity and the human world they built with its degrees of sweetness and bitterness in the dust and breath all around me. Misty and I were among the few stranded stragglers who neither arrived nor exited. Misty shrank into her torn clothes and shuffled behind her cart.

  “Getting carried away here, aren’t we, Ladies?” He was young, blonde, in the usual blue uniform, and he concentrated on me. “What’s going on? Are we having a fight?” He shimmered in and out of the blinking overhead and train lights.

  “Naw, fuck, Refrigerator,” Misty managed, fading further into the darkness behind her cart.

  I stepped closer toward him, unsure what I wanted to do, toss him onto the train tracks, hurry up the stairs and disappear, crush him, kiss him. Misty was right about the pill. I did feel better, as though I was seeing my life occur through a large bowl of water. Events were drifting, tossed onto one another, circles reverberating between them, viewed at such a great distance that they seemed unimportant. I could do anything.

  I stumbled toward the officer. He twirled me around and quickly and expertly locked my wrists behind me in handcuffs. “You’re big and unruly,” he tilt
ed his head up, toward me. I could see his disgust.

  “Can I come too?” Misty asked. She whispered to me, “The grub’s no good but it’s not a bad place to sleep.” She tucked her companion, the shopping cart, underneath the stairs.

  She was growing more rational while I grew unrational. “All my bones did was ask.”

  “Come on, Ladies, time for a little rest.” He led us out of the cavernous, noisy subway and into his well-lit patrol car. He had to tuck the height of me inside.

  “I’m what’s between the subway and clouds.” I wanted to point at the sky. I wanted to tear the metal handcuffs apart and throw them on the floor. I pressed my lopsided face against the car window. It was as familiar as water. I was too scorched by the pill to do anything. At the police station, swarming with men just like him, the young policeman jostled us through procedures which tried to replicate our fingerprints.

  “You still have a few fingers left,” a middle-aged woman commented as she pressed the rind of my remaining fingers onto ink and then paper.

  “Accidental afflictions. Did you want my mechanical arms?” I inquired as the woman frowned at me. “Or the small splashy fingerprints of raindrops?”

  “Here,” Misty offered her hands, “I can do it for both of us.”

  “Names?” the woman asked, cringing.

  “Misty Me,” Misty pointed to herself and the woman wrote it down.

  “Re . . .” I trailed off, “frig . . . er . . . ator.”

  She started to write and then she looked at me, her auburn hair coiffed and unmoving under her hat. “Is Refrigerator your first or last name?”

  “Querulous invertebrate.” I tried to stampede her with words I knew she wouldn’t understand.