by Charles Bock
Bing made a column for each character, and in this way, slowly started shaping their traits, developing ideas for them. He had some thoughts about making the stories and lives and interests intersect, and typed these out as well, under a different heading. Quickly Bing typed out a note about having different characters have overlapping interests and contrary points of view. Less quickly, he considered a follow-up: having plots and subplots based on the overlaps and contrasts. Like one story that revolves around the day a summer movie opens. Most issues would include everybody, but maybe he also could focus on one character in particular, if the situation called for it.
Bing didn't feel his headache so much. Backing up the file, he rose from the bed and stretched his arms above his head and worked the crick from his side. He paced the length of the motel room and scratched at the back of his neck.
There wouldn't be any superpowers; there wouldn't be a whole lot of escapism; but maybe it could be about escapism—like its place in daily life. Like what was going on with each character, what had happened to them. Why their fantasies were not just necessary but so prominent?
7.10
With a simple pull, the cloth around her wrist collapsed like wet toilet paper. Holding her newly freed hand, the girl became reacquainted with the sensation of her skin, the ebb and flow of her racing pulse. She shook her hand, trying to get back the circulation, and though it was a struggle to rise, she managed to crouch, gaining a modicum of balance. The girl began feeling her way around, groping for the side door, the handle. For precious seconds the latch did not give; but finally there was sweet release, gears shifting, a rusty, rolling groan. She did not have time to inhale, no time to let her lungs fill with the fresh night air, but hoisted herself downward, dangling her feet into the open space, then lowering herself onto the sand. The girl braced herself against the truck's hull. Before the strength in her legs had time to solidify, before she'd figured out the lay of the land, she started down the thin path between the ice cream truck and the jalopy next to it, not thinking, not stopping, not even looking up, making it down the crevice and out in front of all those parked cars, keeping on, away from the direction all the noise was coming from, away from the rumors that at that moment were spreading through the party, the whispers about a gang bang that was taking place, the ice cream truck that was rocking, let's go knocking!
Darkness was flat and wide and ambling in all directions. A few bright specks crawled horizontally across the flatlands, but the girl could not afford to look at them for long, just making out the cacti and tumbleweeds in front of her required concentration. She struggled over a mini-dune, lost her balance, fell to one knee and scraped herself. To the farthest left of her field of vision, the city shimmered. She took another step, felt her way along the breaks of the desert, did her best to follow whatever cues the land gave her. Geckos rustled amid the weeds; rattlesnakes burrowed, unseen. She plowed straight through the smaller weeds. Her feet dragged. She limped and held herself and ran her hands up and down her arms, the concert noise and commotion still audible behind her, but less present now than a surrounding stillness, the carrying sound of cars up ahead, whipping along that black road.
At that time of night, pretty much the only things out there were eighteen-wheelers making night runs, their head and cab and grille lights providing small markers that she could track from a distance. When one of those big rigs rumbled up and was upon her, its lights were blinding. The girl stepped off the asphalt's edge and back into the brush, and the rig slammed by with the force of an elevator in free fall, leaving her trembling for long seconds afterward. Nobody stopped. They did not slow. Not even a pulled trucker horn in warning. She thought nothing of this. She expected nothing from them, but stayed off the asphalt, and made her way down a dirt shoulder that was the width of a runner's path, the ground beneath her going hard and baked for stretches, then patchy with soft sand, then turning gravelly. The girl picked off burrs. She checked and restraightened her skirt. Her progress was meager, measured by abandoned objects, what once might have been a computer printer; the twisted corpse of a bicycle without wheels. The girl passed one thing and after a while the next became apparent: value-meal wrappers stuck in weeds; the shards of shattered amber glass; the round end of a crushed aluminum can sticking out of the ground like an artifact from a long lost civilization. She kept going and the city kept shimmering in a distance she could not touch, a faraway place that was not real to her, but that she had to move toward, her legs weary, a thigh muscle trembling involuntarily. The girl's mouth was horribly, impossibly dry. Mosquitoes had bitten the living hell out of her. The soles of her feet burned, her toes feeling as if they had kicked a wall for an hour. And there were other minor aches and inflammations and rebellions, coagulating, one skeletal throb. Though specific pains kept flaring, they were nothing in comparison to her real aches, the pains she was unable to think about, those places she was loath to address. The girl walked and stared out into the wide and dark night and it was quiet, only the slight sounds of her feet on the gravel, the give-and-take of her breathing. But the pattern of her breaths was like a lulling song, and listening to herself breathe calmed the girl with the shaved head, helped her balance on the tight thin wire, remain above the abyss from which there surely would be no return, that place where wisps of madness crashed against the gathering reality of her body's aches. The only way for the girl to survive was to stay out of that horrid place, and the only way to do this was to stay balanced on that wire, and instinctively she did this, following the line of her breaths. The margin along the shoulder of the interstate widened. Her legs were too heavy, too used. She slowed and came to a stop, and now began easing down onto a large round stone. The girl barely felt her raw knee press against jutting rock edges, and in a desiccated whisper, she repeated Oi, singsonging to herself, Oi, oi, oi. She pulled at one boot, then another, in workmanlike fashion dumping the sand and pebbles from each, then spanking their rubber soles. Oi, oi, oi. From below, the mingled odors of vinegar and ammonia wafted. The carriage of her ribs shuddered. The girl was still for long moments, then slowly brought her knees up toward her chest. Once again she confirmed the absence of her undergarment. Felt her pubic thatch tangled and brittle. Her sex tender, stretched and irritated.
Lestat squeezed Danger-Prone Daphney's hand and pumped his strength into her, and though Daphney's palm was limp and clammy, she was still there, squeezing back, giving what she could. Now the end of the reinforced gurney hit the double doors; Daphney whimpered and kept her eyes closed tight. The gurney continued down the hallway and underneath the fluorescent lights, an orderly kept sponging Daphney's brow, and Daphney looked calm to Lestat, like some sort of angel, and this terrified him to no end. Where Daphney's shirt had been cut open, her stomach was engorged and bright with sweat, it was rubbery and unreal. A needle had been jammed into the vein at the crook of her elbow and her arms were strapped into Velcro restraints and Lestat did not take his eyes off of Daphney, but kept gripping her hand. Presently, he spoke and it was as if he were swatting at a fly over his shoulder, and he told the ER administrator to hold off, not to call child welfare. This milk carton, it had Daphney's parents’ address on it. Lestat swore the milk carton was in Daphney's backpack and, and, Just give me a second, goddamn it.
He leaned into Daphney's cheek. “Hold on,” he pleaded. “It's all gonna be fine. I'm here for you. Stay with me.”
After some time the girl began to stir, and pulled her socks up from around her ankles and toes, where they'd bunched. She did not hurry, but felt along the ribbed stripes, delicately patting away the dust. One by one she then removed the thorns from the cotton. When she was finished, one boot went back on. Then the other. The ends of a shoelace were filthy, but she took the lace and evened it out anyway. Instead of relacing, she wrapped each end of the shoelace all the way around her boot's calf, bringing the strings back together at the front. The tongue interrupted, flopping down, getting in the way. As the girl straightened i
t, she constructed excuses as to her whereabouts this evening, and tried to convince herself that her lies were indeed true. Possibilities began, but were not concluded, her thoughts wandering down silent alleys, and if the wisps of madness were not exactly gathering momentum inside her, nonetheless, a withdrawal was under way.
Soon enough the girl with the shaved head would drop her old friends. Her soliloquies would give way to glares, her outbursts to empty shrugs. The girl's mother would notice the fragile shell her daughter had retreated into, and would be concerned by the absence of music from her daughter's voice. How the girl's anger had lost all traces of its former grace, her mother would want to know. Why the eloquence of her outrage had given way to such an unsteady quietude. The girl frequently stayed out late at night, there was nothing new in this; however, in future years the mother would tell a string of therapists about the morning when the aggrieved parents of a twelve-year-old boy showed up at her door with a stringy teenager in tow. They demanded to speak with the girl and, in the living room of her mother's apartment, the girl mostly stared down at the ground. Sometimes she looked over to Lincoln, Lorraine, and Kenny. In halting words, the girl told a story that corresponded with what Kenny had told Lincoln and Lorraine. The boy's parents glowered at the girl, horrified at what she might say. Frequently the girl stopped and restarted, and when she was finished, nobody in the room doubted her veracity. The girl with the shaved head would be cleared of any involvement with Newell's absence, as would Kenny, and this would be one less thing for the girl and her mother to worry about. However, this did not mean her mother was satisfied with the girl's explanation as to why she'd been walking out in the desert alone at that time of night. The party wasn't any fun, nobody would give her a ride—this is all the girl would say, telling her mother to just drop it, storming off or just shutting down. Something had to have happened out there, the girl's mother would conclude, and a significant amount of her next three years would be spent thinking about this night, that it had to have something to do with the change in her daughter. Even more of her time would be spent on the phone with health care representatives, discussing, for the umpteenth time, why exactly payment for the girl's psychiatric sessions kept being denied when the policy clearly stated . . . The girl with the shaved head would have her bachelor's and her master's and would be well into adulthood and still would not feel the comfort or security necessary to bring up the events that happened inside the ice cream truck. Relationships, intimate and working, with men and women alike, would be affected by her reticence, her anger, her temper, and what partners and teachers and employees would call a difficulty with trust. Shying away from physical contact, the girl would repel people. She would be defiant, resistant, abjectly negative. The girl with the shaved head would not be happy with all the anger that was inside of her, nor with how she moved through each day, and she would work diligently on addressing these things, and while this work would not be easy, nothing in this world that matters is easy. The girl with the shaved head would be a work in progress for quite some time, as all of us are.
For now, however, she was slipping backward, into that silence.
And, nominally, she was aware of a pair of high beam headlights. The Plymouth slowed, veering to the right, its tires crunching softly over the gravel, the car pulling up with maybe a yard of space between the girl and the passenger window.
After all this time driving around looking for people to nail, the strangeness of her appearance—this straggly girl, served up on a rock out in the middle of nowhere—felt like it could be a big deal, although Newell did not know how. Like she had been put here for him.
“Yo.”
She would tell authorities about believing the Plymouth to be the kind of car driven by the undercover drug officers at her school. She would admit to freezing up, thinking that if the cops took her in, they'd call her mom. An hour or so and she'd be home.
“Yo,” he repeated. “What are you doing?”
His voice belonged to a child. And beneath this child's attempt at nonchalance, he was tense, the girl could tell that much. Keeping her head low, she raised her pupils, and made out a basic form in the window space.
Another voice now, from inside the car. “You okay?” it asked. “Need a lift or something?”
The engine lulled. The quarter moon sat luminous and large.
Her legs were bent at the knee, her heels firmly planted on the dirt. Reaching down to her untied boot, she took up its loose laces.
“We're not going to hurt you or nothing,” the boy said.
She started a knot. Turned it into a bow.
“Hey.”
From inside the car now, the second voice: “Newell. You better not.”
“I'm not,” the boy answered. “Yo there.”
“I think we should just—” went the second voice.
“I just want to know something.”
“If she's walking, we can't be too far away.”
“Nothing bad, fawck.”
A rustling in the windowsill, the boy moving something, repositioning his body. Again he addressed the girl, this time as if he were making contact with a deaf person: “I JUST WANT TO ASK A QUESTION.”
Now her head rose incrementally, in the movements of someone betraying her better instincts. Her face remained impenetrable, the few traces Newell could make out seemed to form to a resigned and dignified grace.
This was how it worked, she thought. This world was warm promises and sweet breath on your ear and girls who got into cars and were never heard from again.
The only way to know anything, she knew, the only way to the truth, was in blood.
The look she gave caught Newell. Stopped him, even.
He had lived the great majority of his life instinctively, every movement reactive, following whatever whim captured him, saying the funniest thing that popped into his mind. Even now he had a good one ready: You know your shoelaces are untied, right?
“We just asked if you wanted a ride,” he said. “Jesus. It's not like we're going to hurt you or nothing. Chill out. God.”
He felt Kenny's hand pressing down onto his shoulder and jerked away. Newell heard his name being called and the word meant nothing. The girl's eyes were squarely on him now, staring at him in a way that showed her to be a wounded and cornered beast, combative, gathering strength. The way she was looking at Newell let him know that she saw through his lie, and probed deeper, reaching toward a bedrock place inside him. I see what you are. I know exactly what you are.
Newell was marginally aware of his name being called again, Kenny's hand jerking on the tail of his sleeve, jostling his arm. But it was as if these actions were being filtered through a gauze, happening to an entirely different person.
A run-down store on Industrial: Asaaf and Kunjib continued stacking the latest amateur audition duplicates. A Red Roof Inn off I-405 in the San Fernando Valley; Rod Erectile wearily strapped on the knee pads and asked if the syringe was ready. A mongrel dog whimpering, its nose pressed to the desert highway, trying to pick up its owner's scent.
Tonight Newell had already sprayed one woman with fire extinguisher foam. Tonight he had lied to his parents and broken his curfew. Newell had won money on a nickel slot machine that he was not legally allowed to play, while trespassing inside a casino that he was still a good seven years away from being legally allowed inside. Shoplifting. Vandalizing. Broken laws. Challenged commandments. None of it had caused him more than a second thought. Right and wrong had had nothing to do with whether he could get away with an act, how much trouble he might get in. But this was different. The way the girl was looking at Newell clearly let him know she understood that she would not escape, he would succeed in whatever he was about to do. Watching the girl physically brace herself, Newell felt a surge of power, and basked in her helplessness. Until he recognized that he was the source of the pain she was about to feel.
Was it possible for a good friend to make what he said was a massive mistake and sti
ll be your friend—if he said he was sorry, did that erase what he did? Was that the same as the way your parents do things that are unfair, but because they say they love you, that was supposed to make everything better? Like, because they said they knew better and said it was for your own good, it was fine they were fucking you over? And all the times when teachers and adults are right and you are wrong and this only makes you feel worse. Hassling you. Stealing from you. Mother-fuckers laughing at you, doing you wrong, hurting you in deep and meaningful ways, giving you whatever reasons, whatever excuses, and you are left with shit, you are left sucking shit with a straw.
But if he unleashed the fire extinguisher on this injured girl, how was that different from any of them?
He wasn't. He wasn't any different.
Newell's hand was clammy with sweat and his grip around the extinguisher loosened just a bit and now he had the strangest sensation, a disconnect—as if all this was happening inside his head. He could feel the sweat on his hand in his head.
Could he really go through with this, he wondered. Is this what people really do to one another?
And now the girl's body language seemed to change, almost imperceptibly, she seemed to soften in a way that was victorious, defiant even, her face opening with a sickly grin. The shoelaces slipped through her fingertips.
Even when you didn't feel life was moving forward for you, there it was, happening. And if only Kenny could have reached out, if he could have grabbed this last second and held it in place, then everything would have been okay. From the driver's seat it seemed within his grasp, right there in front of him: Newell jerking, making this terrible whelping sound, as if the air had been knocked out of him; the extinguisher canister releasing, falling and hitting the Reliant's floor; the cough of white smoke weakly releasing up and out through the car. Kenny watched, uncertain, confused. He couldn't decipher exactly what was unfolding. His eyes were tearing. He coughed and coughed again. By this time the boy had pushed open the passenger door.