by Charles Bock
Daphney wiped her nose on her wrist. Spent a moment listening to the dog, its paws scratching against pipe fixtures.
“I mean, I know I'm alive, because feeling like that, feeling all shitty and numb and wanting to die, that's what life is, you know? Feeling. So I try to ask for change all nice, be polite and all to these shitkickers who totally don't want to look, they don't want to see some fucked-up pregnant chick in the middle of their vacation. They don't want to feel alive like that, right? And me, sometimes, I just want them to see me so bad, I could just fucking die; I mean, it's like I want them to see me dying. That way, they'll know I'm alive.”
Brushing away tears that had not yet formed, she took a deep breath. “The pain's part of it. If you're not into pain, then don't do it.”
Daphney sniffled, pulling snot back into her nose. Somehow the cough syrup bottle had reappeared in her hand. She took a long swig, grimaced. “Okay. Time to jam.”
Drawing from the crumpled valentine in her lap, she placed some sort of metal into the girl's hand—some kind of tool; compact, heavy. “You're gonna have to get in close,” Daphney said, squirming in place, wiggling her bottom. She yanked her gym shorts down to her ankles, pushed aside the knapsack, spread her legs.
“See my body was just starting to show back then. I guess with the trimesters my lips must have become wider, something, because it's come totally unclasped.”
“Just take it out then.”
“I CAN’T. All the hole needs is an hour and it closes. NO WAY I give up the stud after everything that's happened. Come on. We have to get the ball back into the clasp.”
Daphney paused, giggled self-consciously. “Don't be such a pussy.” Her legs opened, wide and inviting. “Lestat's been begging me to let him do this. You don't even know.
“Hey,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “you know how to use pliers, right?”
Not far away the door creaked on its hinges. Cars passed with airy swooshing sounds. As the girl knelt, her knee settled onto tile that was hard and smooth and uncomfortable. Overhead the lights hummed to life now, brightening the scene in front of her, but just as quickly as the moment came, and her eyes began adjusting, the bulb went dim. The girl decided to wait for her next opportunity, transferred the pliers from her weak to her strong hand, and made an uncertain, preliminary attempt at working their jaws. If she needed more light, Daphney offered her the Bic, and though the offer was made as a joke, the concern underlying it was undeniable.
The girl weakly asked Daphney to hold the lighter a little lower, please, yeah, that should do it.
She edged forward, grimacing, sober now, too sober for her own good, she did not want to be here and she did not know what she was doing and she did not know how to get out of this, and these thoughts were shattered by new sounds—to her immediate left, the mongrel dog, sniffing her face. Now the girl felt a wet brush down the side of her cheek, the dog was licking the girl with the shaved head, dabbing at her face, slobbery and affectionate strokes—an event that Daphney found just perfect; Daphney atop the toilet like an upended turtle, her legs spread in invitation, her pregnant belly hanging down on top of the girl's forehead; Daphney giggling in spite of herself, pulling on the dog's jump rope, the dog pulling right back, going for the girl's eyes.
The lighter's flame caromed. Daphney lurched on her throne, calling out, “Careful now.”
Between the meat of her thighs the studs were gleaming jewels, a misshapen five-petaled flower, and as the girl with the shaved head moved in, an unfresh aroma was suddenly pungent. The girl gagged, then gave a nervous giggle, then, despite herself, continued, peeling apart the vagina's lips, feeling the steel bloom delicate on her fingertips, smooth, its appearance fascinating, alluring.
Daphney exhaled a gasp; her body stiffened. The girl felt an urge to kiss her crown jewel, to take Daphney's clitoral bolt into her mouth, suck and roll it around on her tongue.
As quickly as this instinct passed, the girl was struck by the desire to reach inside Daphney, dig her hand, her whole forearm in there, to reach inside until she got to Daphney's unborn child. She wondered if crushing the child's skull right here and now might be the best thing. Rip that little tadpole baby from Daphney's stomach. Leave that embryo floating in the toilet, but at least finished, at least that.
Withdrawing from between Daphney's legs, she sucked for air, as deep a breath as had ever been taken.
“I need the cough syrup.”
Daphney laughed and seemed relieved herself. “Totally.” Reaching down the side of the toilet, she found the backpack and fumbled about. “Oh,” she said. “Snap. I know what we can do.”
There was more rummaging, the sounds of clatter. The Happy Meal box returned to the domain of the blue-yellow flame.
Daphney liberated the burnt spoon. A small clear vial.
“Wh . . . Wha—”
Incredulous, Daphney cut her off. “Let me get this straight. I'm letting you take pliers into my cooch—and YOU can't trust ME ?”
4.3
A collective oooh. Bodies spilled off the widened sidewalk, ignored traffic signals, bypassed the elevated walkways whose construction had cost taxpayers many a pretty penny. Necks craned, cameras flashed; in front of the pirate-themed hotel, the show was under way: a pair of larger-than-life-size nineteenth-century barges engaging each other: hired acrobats swinging from the airy sails. White smoke billowed, cannonballs flew.
The windshield of the FBImobile was soaked with electricity. Feedback reverberated through a crappy door speaker (the other had blown out three songs ago). In Kenny's eardrums, the speed metal and industrial noise of college radio station KUNV sounded like a whole lot of static and mess. He nodded dully along to the distortions. His fingers clung limply to the bottom rung of the steering wheel.
To his right, the boy remained slumped in the shotgun seat, eyes shut, his head resting on both the window and the bucket seat. All the running and screaming and excitement with the cell phone must have tuckered him out. All the chaos Newell caused, wasn't it something how oblivious he looked? How at peace.
Beyond the child's dormant body, above and behind the lump of his Adam's apple, a mast toppled, landing in the created lagoon with a spectacular splash. Kenny took in the choreographed effect without much interest, and looked beyond it, down the length of the Strip, taking in as much of its pulsing scale and scope as he could at once. The spectacle was too large and bright, reaching above the limits of the windshield, farther into the distance than his eyes could follow, each inch flashing, blinking. But as he stared, singular facets were discernible, not quite catching his eye so much as they came into focus, providing Kenny with points to concentrate on: a mammoth, postmodern take on the Egyptian pyramids that was sleek and shiny as black onyx; the glittering Eiffel Tower and the recreated laser-bright arc that acted as its hotel entranceway.
Kenny reached forward and turned the stick thing where the volume knob once had been; and as he did, the meat of the boy's neck became apparent to him. Newell's jugular predominated, appearing unnaturally thick.
Rhythms from neighboring car stereos and taxi horns merged in with what was left of the distorted radio noise. Motorcycle engines gunned unrepentantly—because if James Dean were still alive, even at a hundred and nine, that's what he'd have been doing. Traffic wasn't moving at all. For a moment Kenny stared at the big rig that was cruising solely to draw attention to the movie poster airbrushed on its flank. He noticed the small group of Hispanics, exhausted and still wearing their hotel uniforms, who had gathered underneath a bus station's covered waiting area. Someone kept their horn pressed for an extended period, and this brought a spate of other horns. Kenny adjusted himself in his seat, moving his tailbone off a crushed soda cup. He'd spent a half hour cleaning the front seats, and felt the FBImobile was looking pretty good, but oh well, no one was perfect.
His breaths were soft and he looked to his right and watched the boy sleeping. For a time Kenny invested himself in New
ell's peace. His eyes moved down the boy's body now; he looked at the plastic cup balanced in Newell's crotch.
Inside the FBImobile there was a palpable inevitability, the sense of a predetermined result reaching its conclusion.
The moment was torture, for with it Kenny not only stared, but caught himself staring, and still did not stop, but for the first time was consciously aware that he was lingering on the sight—the cup perfectly at rest between the boy's thighs. Kenny felt himself flushed and tingling and very much ashamed. It was all he could do to stay inside his own skin, all he could do to force his eyes upward.
Luminescent mythologies. Blinking in montage.
A lone building seemed to call out: a darkened shell, its exoskeleton lined with scaffolds and pulley systems. Kenny swallowed dryly. A word he could not read flashed from the high-definition marquee in front of the hull, and was followed by the promise of a grand Christmas opening. Messages seemed to extend through the translucent night, stretching and dancing across the FBImobile's windshield, melding there with the residue of so many brake lights, the effluvia so much hotel glow. And beneath this unrelenting glare Kenny felt very dark. And underneath so many towers he felt so very small, so fragile and uncertain and impossibly alive.
And maybe a time would arrive when he would look back on this particular moment with some semblance of clarity. Years down the line perhaps—when his difficulties were behind him, mostly, and he no longer tossed and turned in bed, repositioning himself so often that it was as if he were wrestling a ghost; when he was emerging from his shell, stepping into a more secure, though admittedly fragile, sense of manhood; when Kenny was by no means talkative, and still could slip back into his shadow self, the haunted young man, but for the most part was making progress, and even had let his guard down somewhat.
A time of relative peace. No more created fabrications to cover for his adolescence, no more apologies about where he grew up. Even a stable, loving relationship. Kenneth, as friends and colleagues would refer to him, would have taken up the hobby of gardening by this time, and would be fastidious about watering the plants he kept in terra-cotta pots on the apartment windowsill. He'd attend therapy sessions twice a week, paid for through the generous benefits package he received from a North Beach–based graphic arts and design firm. There, Kenneth specialized in computer animation and did not engage in much office banter, but was a steady, dependable worker, regarded by coworkers as just about the dearest soul you could ever know.
Maybe this is when he would be able to put it all into perspective.
Equally possible was a different take on Kenny's future. A stretch on the downside of his twenties—after he had cleaned the booze and reek from his clothes, molars, and whole person; after he had bottomed out and pulled himself back up, and had some two and a half years of folding chairs and stale coffee and the dead air of church basements under his belt; when one of the Jew's twin grandsons, despite reservations galore, had hired him back at the pawn shop. A time when all the relapses and recoveries and painful brick-by-brick reconstructed temples of self, they'd led to a true yogi, not a faker this time, but a guru with the most awesome and enlightening Shakti that Kenny had ever felt. At long last, Kenny would be able to accept—truly and utterly—that it was time to get beyond his past, really this time, to let go. Freeing himself of the sins of his youth by forgiving his youthful self.
Or perhaps it would stop being important. After the fifteenth funeral. Once he had been the caretaker of those friends who had been closest and dearest to him. Once he had cradled their muscular bodies through painful disintegrations, watched their gregarious minds go dim. Once all the drug cocktails and protease inhibitors and radical therapies had been countered and for some reason fifteen funerals was the limit, the fifteenth being just too many for a man to feel remorse about the teenager he had been all those lifetimes ago.
One more bead in a necklace of awful memories. One more shameful moment in a lifetime spent without affection. An invisible man pushing a mop through a gray building, unable to interact with people, radiating such bitterness that even when he tried to open up, you could not help but want to shy away.
Or maybe a woman would untie this necklace—she'd enter his life and there would be a moonlit stroll and Kenny would start to tell her about his teen years, and this great burden would be removed from his shoulders, because he'd never really told anybody any of this before.
“We were just fooling around,” he would say. “You know how kids goof.”
Just as possible is a morning when crevices were etched into his face and his hair was thinning. A four in the morning when he lay in bed with a young man he'd eyed at a dance club in rebuilt New Orleans—a sweet muscular thing to whom Kenny had assured his negative status, then sodomized without mercy, the fifth muscle boy he would have done this to during Mardi Gras season. It is possible that a regretful and tired Kenny would lie in bed and share a glass of water with this poor doomed young fool. It is possible Kenny would stare at soft blond curls and blue eyes that were too pure to be innocent. Kenny would answer the question, then listen to a wood-chipped, honeyed response, this idiot unable to believe that anybody grew up in Las Vegas, let alone anybody gay.
Perhaps to shut the trick up, or because he himself had fallen under the ceiling fan's lullaby, this Kenny would start talking, his words redoubling on themselves, catching and pained, with disclaimers and rejoinders, an unorganized stream. Free associating and trying to figure out what to say next, by turns ironic and mocking, yet still failing to cover his deeply ingrained shyness, his fundamental embarrassment. Although, really, what was he embarrassed about, the awakening of a young man's sexuality is a beautiful thing, when you stop and think about it.
Maybe, in the New Orleans hotel room, this graying incarnation of Kenny would become reflective, and would think back to his dad's trailer. Back to magazines spread all over the floor. He would laugh at himself, telling the trick that it wasn't until years later that he realized that a big part of what he'd been looking at in those pictures involved men. Wasn't until his mom had passed away, when Kenny'd gone home to go through everything, he'd had the epiphany: flipping through those old sketches, he'd discovered a significant minority of his old drawings focused on male anatomy. Kenny the Elder would shake his head at just how clueless he had been. And then he'd start to talk about this dude, hadn't thought of him in years, but he used to see him in the hallways at his old high school—it wasn't even a high school, really, but this dude and Kenny would see each other, and they'd had a flirtation, Kenny's teenage self had been too clueless to realize that's what it was, but now it was clear. Kenny would remember other clues he had not been able to see, had been too naïve to understand, and when he was done talking about them, he would return to that long-ago Saturday night, to the fishbowl of the Strip, his swirling confusion, the sense of terror that was unleashed inside of him.
In an altogether different future, a somber man stares out of his window, taking in the distant image of the Bay Bridge.
“So many things in life seem like a big deal,” he says. “But then, when you look back, it's hard to imagine what the fuss was about. You're here, right? And things are how they are. So you maybe tell yourself that it didn't matter. You convince yourself. Or try to, anyway.”
A misting chill, the slightest defensiveness entering his voice. “It's natural to have excuses. Especially when you know you messed up.”
From behind, his partner would wrap his arms around Ken's waist, and Ken would remember just what it felt like pulling up to the Ewings’ home.
He'd been exhausted by then. He and the bald girl had searched out in the desert for what must have been an hour. Flailing around in darkness. You weren't able to see five feet in front of your face, and so all you could do was just call out the boy's name. Kenny would remember shouting until his voice was hoarse. He would remember finding sand in his hair for days afterward. They'd driven up and down I-15 and they'd fought through al
l the crowds at the party, and it had all been in vain. He'd pulled into the driveway. He was trying to get ready for what had to come next. You know, how am I going to do this?
The lights were on in the front window and for a few seconds it was as if everything might be fine, like maybe the boy somehow had found his way back on his own. But Newell's parents wouldn't have come out of the house like that, this rush of worry and expectations.
His mother just this stunning woman, so beautiful that she could not go inside stores. She'd always been polite to him before. But now her eyes were wild. She grabbed his arm, dug her nails into his flesh.
It was the dawn of his life as a suspect. They made him take them, show them, driving him back out into the desert, trying to draw him out on the details along the way, which had just been awful, the father controlled behind the wheel, maybe even a little kind in the way he asked his questions, though each follow-up was more specific, asking for clarifications, making adjustments to previous inquiries where maybe, Kenny figured, he hadn't answered the right way. There was a lot of silence and tension, Kenny could feel Newell's mom was ready to go off on him at any moment, and while he tried to answer as best he could, be as helpful as possible, at the same time there was a limit.
The sun had been rising over the mountains and a pale yellow light had covered the brush and weeds and vast emptiness. The stage was still out there. A couple of teens who Kenny guessed the promoters hired were straggling about, red-eyed and bagging trash. Soon enough, investigators would be there as well, taking plaster casts of different footprints, finding the remnants of treads that corresponded to the size and make of the boy's Nikes. They'd discover one trail over by the side of the interstate, exactly where Kenny said they'd been. Another trail, deep in the desert, led to a third set, harder to track and not an exact match. That one had been disrupted by other footprints and smears and scufflings. But near a collection of tire treads where most of the cars had parked—half of one heel print would match up.