Seeing Double

by Karen Runge

  “I don’t know how we’ll get her in and out of her clothes,” Daniel said. Daniel, practical. But also, posing. Because when I looked back at him I knew immediately what he had in mind.

  “She’s perfect for it,” he said when he saw my face. “You know she is. Isn’t that why we chose her?”

  “Yes. It’s why we chose her.”

  I bent close to her again. My hair fell over my shoulder, shielding us. I had this bare second alone with her. This moment with her. I kissed her cheek, I cupped her face. To say sorry? Or maybe to say goodbye? If I believed in those mindless platitudes, I might’ve said something.

  But then again, what for?

  “Ada can watch this,” Daniel said. “Ada likes to watch me do stuff like this.”

  “What are we going to do?” you asked.

  You said we, not you. Which I thought was telling. Including yourself in this act you could not yet comprehend.

  “You ever get a girl to let you fuck her tits?” he asked you.

  “Yeah…”

  “This is something like that.”

  Nothing like that, I thought but didn’t say.

  Daniel fetched his neat little blade. The stiletto, fluted ivory. Antique. Bought in London when he was eighteen with all the money he could muster. He showed it to you. An open palm, a flash of silver. I saw you go cold. I saw your eyes freeze over, saw them shimmer like a pane of glass held high in a wild gale. Warping.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She won’t die.”

  No, this does not kill. This does not even maim. This damages, only. And what damage doesn’t leave you with a story to tell? A new understanding of your own limits. And there are no limits to limitless things.

  “She’ll have a really nice scar,” Daniel said. “It’ll look like she had a boob job. You know? Just a small scar, right there against her ribs. Women already put plastic in their tits. What harm could a dick possibly do?”

  I sat in the armchair opposite the couch, and you came to me.

  “I need to sit down.”

  An order. A command.

  “All right then.”

  I stood and let you take it. I sat back down in your lap.

  I didn’t need your permission. You sick fuck. This man I almost loved. Leaning back against your chest. Your heartbeat thrumming against my spine as Daniel bent over her, lifted her breast, tested the place. I felt the thrill coursing through you, your arms closing around me, your hands closing in, coming together between my thighs. I shifted.

  Daniel’s blade. Your fingers.

  The blade snuck in and out, deeper, probing softness, wetness. Slack flesh spilling blood. A flash of yellow, bright as corn. The fat within. I lifted my hips, the knife came out. Daniel dropped his pants. You bit my shoulder, undid your jeans. I lowered myself onto you. Daniel eased himself into that hole he’d put in her skin, tearing it. Scarlet rush, fluid and blood, moving. Sighing. And you beneath me, within me, stabilising me with your breath warm between my shoulders, your hands tight between my legs.

  A line of warm, rich blood leaked down. Beautiful as lace and just as fine. Spreading, interlocking. Your hands, my hips.

  You were hugging me, I thought. Blood on my tongue, red before my eyes. Holes widening, flesh sinking. Flesh into flesh. And you, there with me. Something else for me to think about. Something holding me in place.

  – TWENTY-SEVEN –

  Ada rode the trains. Darkness, tunnels, displacement. The train was overcrowded, suffocating her with elbows and hips and bags and feet and heavy breaths. The thick syrup of humanity sick in her nose. Sweat, skin, dirty hair. And eyes on her. So many eyes. She kept her own eyes still, standing stiff between a heavy-set guy in a filthy T-shirt and a waifish young girl dressed in something that looked unnervingly like a wedding dress. Lace and long sleeves and gauzy fabric pulled tight over a bony body. The girl smelled bad, too.

  I would like to rip it all off of her, Ada thought with venom. Show her to herself. Dressed like a princess, posing for herself. Like the body beneath isn’t just bones and blood and meat. That smell. Why does she smell so bad?

  Someone’s backpack was pressing against her shoulders. A kid too short-sighted to think of taking it off and holding it between his knees in the crush. She felt a thick pulse of revulsion and fury. Unreason. She wanted to get out of this human straitjacket, but doing so would mean moving closer to someone else. Pushing against someone else. Being touched by someone else. Ada, clean and perfumed, her lips painted and her hands trembling on the bar over her head, felt the train rocking under her feet. She visualised destruction.

  Daniel loves taking the subway. What the fuck is there to love about it? For that matter, what is there to love about anything in this city?

  The train slowed toward the next station and Ada made for the door without thinking. She was still two stops away from her destination—home!—but it wasn’t until she stepped off and came clear of the crowd that she realised she was on an unfamiliar platform.

  Okay. Just take a minute, she told herself, recognising the name of the station—not home but not far from home, not too far—taming the panic and wondering how high over her head the sky was from here. How deep down she was. And then realised that there was no sky over her, not in this city. Just a smog-smudged dome polluted grey with weak sunlight trickling in.

  Why am I here? What am I doing here? Why am I here at all?

  Because Daniel had put a ring on her finger. Because Daniel had found a way to make her stay. Promising her an escape but building a different prison for her instead. And one with legal implications, too.

  Oh my God. What have I done?

  The thought hit her like an explosion behind her eyes. Desperate, she moved to one of the pillars and pressed her back to it, out of the way of the commuters that thronged around her. She fought her mind.

  There’s something behind me now. Something solid. Something keeping me in place.

  With the train gone the crowd around her thinned, then gradually began again to surge. She ignored the stares directed at her.

  Yes I’m foreign, but for fuck’s sakes I’m a human being, too.

  She moved to the end of the platform, far from the stairs, where most people wouldn’t think to board. She stood close to the edge and stared into the tunnel, waiting for the light at the head of the train to appear there in the reach of darkness.

  Just two more stops and we’re home, she told herself. This word we was used in comfort. A friend in her mind, soothing her.

  By some magic trick of timing, the next train was less crowded. She took an empty seat by the doors and leant her head on her hands, her elbows on her knees. She refused to look around, studying feet instead.

  Designer shoes…broken boots…sports shoes…high heels…sandals…

  She wished she’d brought a book this time. Something to vanish inside of. Something to hold up to hide her face. She felt eyes on her. She knew without looking what the expressions would be. Open mouths, gaping. Glassy eyes, ogling. Even if she met those wondering gazes, the expressions on the faces wouldn’t change. Wouldn’t flinch. Not comprehending that she too had eyes. That she saw straight back.

  They’re tearing the flesh off of me, she thought. They’re eating me alive. Just by looking.

  Her skin burned, prickled.

  Every place has its annoyances, Daniel often told her. You need to keep that in mind. You can’t be so sensitive.

  Still.

  When she reached her stop she rose quickly and stepped off. She was on the opposite side to her exit, her wanderings at the alien platform having turned her around. But she knew where she was now. She knew where to go. She moved smartly, swiftly, her head high, her eyes on the stairs ahead. Those steps rose in a happy wall, waiting to lead her up and out.

  She didn’t see or sense the man behind her. A hand grabbed her shoulder from behind—a flurry of impact—and she let out a small scream, whirling round to see a young local man. He stepped away
from her in chagrin and held up a phone.

  My phone? For a moment she wondered if she’d dropped hers somehow and he was returning it. But no, it wasn’t hers, and she realised he wanted her to read a message he’d typed on the screen.

  Not imagining that if he spoke to her in his language, she might understand.

  Ada read: You are beautiful. I love you. Make a friend? She laughed, apologetic. Feeling sorry for this man who’d burst into her space with his opportunistic need, his trembling hand.

  “No, no,” she said. And smiled, offering goodwill in place of hard feelings.

  She turned away from him, smiling a little to herself now, flattered in spite of herself. It would’ve taken him some effort, some planning, to compose that message, to have it ready.

  She was almost at the stairs when he rushed up behind her again, this time his hand bumping her harder. A grab for her hip.

  “You scared me,” she said in his language, and he took a step back, stunned. She instantly regretted showing him that it was possible to communicate, but he didn’t speak, deciding that, no, he must have heard wrong. There was no way what she said was something he could understand. Instead he held the phone up again for her to read, the gesture more forceful this time: One night stand?

  She stared in disbelief. “No.” She waved him away, beyond amusement now, remembering the feel of his hand, that blunt force on her shoulder, that grab for her flesh.

  Flesh.

  “No, no, no.”

  Reeling, she ran up the stairs away from him, her heart thundering in a familiar panic-beat. Suddenly she was grateful for the density of the city. If he were to follow her home he would have no opportunity to attack her. Not without there being dozens of witnesses. In this way at least, she was safe.

  Or maybe he was just the kind of guy who isn’t afraid to push his luck.

  She ran up the escalators anyway, daring to grab at the handrail, that grease-slick snake of black rubber trekking filth in a constantly revolving loop. This time she didn’t think about it. Anything to get out. To get away a little faster.

  She was on the street and halfway home when she realised her underwear was damp, and little licks of warm energy were ticking away at her nerves. She recognised her state of arousal with wonder. It was already way ahead of her, feeding her with images. They barrelled through her mind in blood-lit flashes, building the sensation.

  A girl in a white lace dress.

  A girl lying on the platform.

  Strangers stepping past, oblivious.

  Flesh.

  Wedding fabric ripped from the girl’s body, her belly cleaved, her intestines uncoiled.

  Just flesh.

  Thick red ribbons steaming, warm and slick, turgid.

  Crushed under Ada’s heel.

  Ground into the ground.

  Wet on hard.

  Ours to take.

  Friction.

  Destruction.

  Death.

  Ours to—

  When she got home, she closed the door behind her and leaned back against it, not even dropping her handbag before she reached up under her skirt and yanked her underwear down. Wetness welcomed her fingers.

  – TWENTY-EIGHT –

  I used to walk with Daniel, too. Do you hate me for telling you that? Am I hurting you, yet? I don’t want to.

  No, wait.

  I do.

  You and I never talked about Daniel. Not as something that I belonged to. Not as something that belonged to me. He was your friend. He was the man I lived with. The man you shared me with when we were not together. And when we were. But alone on our walks we skirted around him, a black hole between us. The event horizon that froze us in place, stuck beside each other, no closer together and no further apart. Even as we walked together in the grey air, kicking at trash and breathing in the thick, hazy stench of polluted water.

  I never told you this before. But I’ll tell you about it now.

  Daniel and me. He’d been here for three years, and I’d been here for three months. This was when everything around me was still strange and new. The language twisted around my tongue in knots; euphoria and incomprehension a vise around my heart, spiking me with pain and panic, crushing me with joy. And I found myself beside him. An interpreter. A translator. A man I’d met who wasn’t brash, wasn’t crass. Perhaps the first. Quite possibly the last. I’d snatch glances at him out the corner of my eye. His rigid profile, his hard eyes, his firm mouth. Handsome in his severe way. Mostly it was his eyes that I wanted to look at, to look into. Whenever I turned away from him, I couldn’t quite remember what he looked like. His features tended to blur. As though they kept changing, shifting. As though his appearance was some trick he was playing on me, and everything about him was different the moment I took my eyes off him.

  It was reason enough to keep meeting him, I guess.

  He didn’t take me to the river, where I took you. I found that place by myself, in time. Instead we went through the back alleys in the ancient quarter, far from the modern gleaming glass walls and trash blown streets of the district I lived in at the time. Because this was before I moved in with him. Because this was before…everything. And long before you.

  “You don’t know this city,” he told me. “You don’t know this culture—you don’t know anything until you see it the way it used to be. The way it was. The way it still is, beneath the veneer.”

  He talked like that. Used phrases like that. “Beneath the veneer.” Spoken in his smooth, crisp English, so very much the embodiment of an upper class cliché with his stiff jaw and his eyes at half-mast. So much like this that I sometimes had to work hard not to laugh at him. I stopped myself because I had a sense that if I did, he might do something. Hit me, maybe. There always was the threat of violence in the way he kept his hands jammed in his pockets. Clenched, hidden. Not like you, who kept yours free, in plain sight.

  You, at least, were always more direct about your malice. More honest, in some ways, about your desire to do harm.

  For the first serious date he took me on, we went to the barbecue street. That famous place. Another tourist trap. I wore a sleek red bodice, a black lace bra. Blue jeans. My hair clipped up in a French barrette. It was the first time I dressed up for him. Lipstick greasy on my mouth, my perfume at war with my sweat. It was summer, hot. There was fire there. Lots of it. And crowds of people thronged between the rows of stalls. Shoulders and heads and slow-stepping feet. Smoke thick in the air, the smells of spice and meat and things not meat. Everything, roasting. Young men with cardboard fans and close-shaved heads worked over the coals, waving back the smoke, turning kebabs. Crowds pushed backwards and forwards with skewers in their hands. Eating incredible things. Dropping the sticks. Spikes under my feet.

  I told myself, Not thorns.

  On this street they roasted scorpions, snakes, frogs. Silkworms, beetles, cicadas. Innards, testicles, eyeballs. All the imaginable parts not meat. The unimaginable parts, too.

  Daniel and I bought plastic cups of beer from vendors. It spilled easily, froth slipping over the edge in a slow, sticky slide. None of the cups were ever quite cold enough. We gulped it back; we drank too fast. I worried where the bathrooms were. Remembered that the public restrooms in this place were all holes in the ground, clamped in aluminium, the tile splashed with urine turned brown from the filth brought in by shuffling feet. Stepping in it. I wasn’t used to that yet.

  I told myself, Wait.

  We wandered deeper down that thick, moving street. Crush and rush and incredible heat. We stopped at a larger stall, one decked out with labels written in English. American tourists gaggling, gawking. Daniel dragged me past them. He led me by the hand.

  “Now this is worth taking a picture of,” he said, laughing.

  They specialised in phalli. Horse, donkey, pig, cow. Even chicken, tiny and pink, skewered together so that each stick looked like some sort of sea-creature. Tendrils and rubbery tips, soft and raw.

  One of the gu
ys working the coals caught my eye, my wonderstruck expression. He smirked at me from behind his stall. Yelled to me in English, “You want some penis?”

  Laughing when I laughed. Winking at me.

  But then Daniel’s arm closed around my shoulder. “Do you? I’ll buy it for you.”

  Awkward. He was trying too hard. Spoiling the joke, I thought. But now, looking back, it’s possible that he was sincere. That he wanted to watch me eat a phallus. To see how I looked, tearing at it with my teeth.

  I shook my head. Smiled an apology to the guy at the coals. We moved on. We ate kidneys instead. Heavily spiced, rich, the texture dense and thick. I ate a row of chicken hearts. Tense little purses of tough flesh, squirting in my mouth, blood leaking down my chin. I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

  He watched.

  “I’m coming back with you tonight,” he said.

  And I laughed. “No you’re not.”

  “I want to see your art,” he said.

  I still don’t know why I agreed to that. I believed him, I think. Maybe it was that.

  * * *

  He walked with me. He wanted to see my paintings. My personal take on disassembling form. He wanted to know which parts I chose to see. Or forced myself to see. I interested him like that. But not you. That’s where you and Daniel always differed. You were blunt, direct, a lead pipe smashed over the head. And Daniel was nothing if not dense with subtleties.

  And so he came back with me that night. And I showed him.

  A woman’s breast in transection. Fat and skin and fine layers of tissue. I used purple, indigo, blue. The gland within a florid green. Something rancid, rotting beneath the surface. Something you’d have to slice into to see.

  A vivid blue eye with a violent red pupil. Exploding tears. Fanciful tadpoles, spermatozoa swimming. Spinning.

  A parking lot, dark, a woman standing under a streetlamp. Faceless in miniature. I did that in pen and ink, of course. I knew there was no brightness in that place. I remembered it too well.