by Averil Dean
I wonder what it would feel like to fly. To see the cliffs and the hotel disappear behind me, to dive like a kingfisher into the crumpled sea. The wind makes me feel light, as though I could sail away on a current of air. I close my eyes, stretch out my arms like wings, cup the wind in my hands and let it carry my arms up and down.
I imagine what I might look like from a window of the motel, poised here like a crippled bird at the edge of the sky. It’s so easy to perforate the membrane between what’s acceptable and what is not, between normalcy and deviance. My perforations are literal. Every nick is an attempt to make solid that shimmering altered consciousness, to get through and behind the curtain of pain, into that shining world a-spin on its axis where everything that hurts is suddenly liquid soft and warm.
The reality, of course, is ugly. Bloody. And misunderstood.
Which is how I came to be admitted to the Parker-Nash Mental Health Center at the age of fourteen. Suicide had never entered my mind, but explaining that I’d gone too far and laid my nicks in the wrong place was not a satisfying explanation to the big concerned faces around me. The incident would not be taken lightly, I was told. I would be helped.
And so began the conversation. Or attempts at conversation. Shrinks have a way of waiting for you to speak—legs crossed, arms open, aggressively silent, letting the vacancy consume the patient’s inhibitions. This probably works in paid therapy. After all, who would fork over two hundred dollars to sit in a chair for fifty minutes and refuse to speak? But I found in the silence another blade to play with. I didn’t correct anyone’s assumptions about me or answer any question more than once. I collected the most painful statements and replayed them in the silence; I let people know that I heard what they were saying about me and didn’t give a shit.
How long I would have played this new game, I don’t know. Because after about a week, Molly Jinks was admitted and took up residence in the room down the hall. She told me later that she had awakened one day utterly convinced that she would die if she left the Center, that it would have been like stepping into outer space. She’d suddenly felt as if gravity would not exist for her, that without the protection of four walls and a roof she would simply lift off the ground and float away. When her soc tried to coax her out of the room, Molly dug in and refused to move. Apparently things went downhill from there, with Molly holding on to the doorframe with both hands, screaming and biting at anything she could reach.
“Intellectually,” she would tell me years later, “I knew I was being irrational. But you become disconnected from your body when you can’t see it. You begin to drift.” She thought about this, and her voice became petulant. “I just wanted to be left alone. I couldn’t understand why everybody kept pulling at me.”
For two days I watched the people around her at the PNC. The patients were afraid of her. An eyeless albino. A freak. Most unfit of all the misfits. The nurses were kind and professional, but they tended to approach her slowly and hurry away. What courage, they said, looking over their shoulders. What a pity!
Yet Molly was docile, sweet to the adults as always. Her resting expression was that of a blind Madonna, a wise half smile playing on her lips as if she were immersed in a world that had only become visible after Lyle Pax pulverized her eyes with a hand spade. She was beyond the membrane. I was fascinated.
It was Molly who came to me, though how she discovered I was there I still don’t know. I was in my chair by the window, where I’d been for the better part of a week, silently watching the wind move through the treetops and the people outside scurrying down the patchy sidewalk. I heard her cane tapping along the wall and watched her round the corner and cross the carpeted living room.
She had grown taller, of course, in the four years since I’d last seen her. Unlike me, she’d developed a woman’s body, slim and lithe, with a lovely flared hipbone and long, slender fingers. Her body should have redeemed her beauty in some way, but somehow it only made her ravaged face more disconcerting—like a Lladró figurine with a chipped goblin’s head glued on top.
Molly patted and crept her way into the chair across from mine, settling back with her legs pulled up to her chin. She unfastened a braid and began to pluck it apart.
“Alice,” she said as if in explanation.
“Molly,” I said, so we’d know where we were.
“You weren’t going to say hello?”
“Vow of silence,” I said. My voice was hoarse with disuse.
From down the hall we heard a fight begin between a patient and one of the nurses: Get off me! Get your fucking hands off me! Yelling was common among the lunatics; we barely noticed it.
“I thought you’d write me,” she said.
“I did. But there was no place to send the letters.”
“M. Jinks,” she said. “Care of noooobody.”
“Care of the state of Washington.”
“Exactly.” She smiled, her face turned to the light. The scars radiated from under her black glasses like a child’s drawing of the sun. Her fingers twitched at her braid. “I’m surprised to find you here, Alice. I thought you had better survival skills.”
“My skills are fine. I am surviving.”
“I see. Got tired of being the good girl?”
I thought about this. “I’m exploring my options,” I said.
“Oh, right. Let’s review. Option one: be charming and lovely. Find your forever home, become a schoolteacher, marry well and have two point five children and a house in West Bellevue.”
“I’m sunk right out of the gate.”
“True. Miss Congeniality, you are not. Moving right along to option two: lay low, eighteen and out. Learn to play the guitar. Develop a heroin addiction—not there yet, are you?”
“No, but I’m not ruling it out.”
“Right? You could end your days like a rock star, face down in vomit on the floor of a seedy motel.”
“A rock star with no musical talent. Unprecedented.”
Molly laughed. “Option three: perfect the art of the snarl. Bite the hands that feed you.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Get jiggy with a bullwhip. Become a jewel thief in a leather mask, the next feline fatale.”
“I’d look terrible in a catsuit.”
“Go bald,” she said. “You could be—”
“Lex Luthor.”
She nodded, leaning her head back on the chair. I could see the bottoms of her empty eye sockets from under her glasses. It was like seeing a man with his zipper undone.
“It’s good to have options,” she said softly.
When it was time for dinner, Molly folded up her cane and took my arm. I was startled, and awkward as I led her down the hall to the dining room, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, “aren’t you? I always thought you would be.”
It felt like an accusation.
“Aren’t you?” she said again.
“It doesn’t matter what I look like.”
Her head swiveled toward me.
“Really,” she said. “I can’t think of anything that matters more.”
Late that night, I heard someone crying. This was not unusual; a lot of crying went on at the PNC, though usually it was a morning or late-afternoon activity. I tried to ignore it and focus on my book, but the sobs went on and on. Muffled at first, then with a long-drawn sound: ayy, ayyyy... Soothing professional voices joined in, offering comfort, but those two long sounds rose to a scream, and after a minute I realized they were words.
“My eyes. My eyes!”
With mine closed now, I try to imagine a life in darkness so complete that even the noonday sun couldn’t penetrate it. There would be no waiting for the dawn. No hours of daytime safety. Only darkness and the fear of drifting away.
&n
bsp; A wave of exhaustion ripples through me. I tip back my head and let my body sway in the wind.
Without warning, Jack appears beside me, his hand like a manacle around my upper arm.
“Jesus, baby, step back. What the hell are you doing?”
I look down, surprised, and realize how close I have come. My toes are one tuft of grass from the cliff’s edge. If the ground were to crumble, we would fall fifty feet to the rocks below. I take a few cautious steps back and manage a smile.
“For a minute there, I imagined I could fly,” I say.
Jack puts his hand on the top of my head and turns me around, takes my hand and leads me back up the path to the motel. The room is small and beautiful, with pale blue walls and snowy bedding, and a tufted headboard of yellow silk damask. I close the striped drapes and he runs a shower. Silently, he undresses me, laying slow kisses upon my breasts, sweeping his hands over my chilled skin as though to reassure himself that I’m still in one piece.
“Don’t go to the edge without me,” he says. “You might fall.”
He pulls me into the shower and washes my hair, slicks my body with soap, sips the river that streams between my breasts and over my nipples. I kneel before him and take him in my mouth. He tastes clean, almost sweet, his cock gliding across my tongue and easily back, while the water slips like summer rain over our skin.
I trace his body with my hands. The flattened ripples of his abdomen, like the sea-pressed patterns on a sandy beach; the ridge above his hip, and the firm curve of his ass; the long ropey sinew at the backs of his knees, his thighs rough with hair. I cup my hands over his forearms as he smooths the water from my face. This is where his power is, in the clever strength of his fingers, in the fat-veined muscle on the underside of his arm. His body fills me with pride.
Mine. He wants me, he’s mine.
He presses into my mouth and I sink lower before him, tilting my head, waiting with my tongue out like a child in the rain. Instead, he tugs at my arm and lifts me to my feet, slides me up the wall and buries himself inside me with one clean, complete stroke. My back slips along the tile, my legs lock around him. I drink the water from our kiss, gasping and crying out from the sweetness of it.
* * *
For dinner that evening we have seafood at a small restaurant on the edge of the pines. Below us is the beach we’ve just left, where the tide is rising over the rocks, opening fans of sea-spray-tinged orange from the setting sun.
I devour a tangle of salmon-pink crab legs, dripping with butter, while Jack attacks a plate of raw oysters.
“Mmm-mmm,” he says. “Like eating a mermaid’s pussy.”
“So crude.”
“The mermaids have nothing on you.” He gives me a lopsided smile, one that reminds me of how he must have looked as a boy. His hair is still tousled from the beach and there are fine grains of sand clinging to his eyebrow. He dabs some wasabi cream on the last oyster and slurps it into his mouth. “So, I was thinking.”
“Always good.”
“We should do it again.”
I crack apart a shell and draw out a tender chunk of crab meat.
“You liked it, too,” he says.
I don’t answer. I’m thinking of the scent of the leather man’s house, the texture of his blanket against my cheek and the landscape of crumpled bedding, a foreign mountain range viewed from the side—and Jack inside me, all the way inside me, his hands splayed over the welts on my ass that lasted through the next day, his fingertips circling, making me come.
I shift in my seat, roll the seam of my pants over my clitoris, cross my legs to press the ache away. I watch his face. The power in his jaw as he eats, the width of his hands. Light streams over his hair, flashes on his teeth as he grins at me. He knows.
I want to do it again.
* * *
After dinner I ask Jack to take me to a bar.
“You can get me drunk and take advantage of me.” I link my arm through his as we leave the restaurant.
“I don’t need to get you drunk for that.”
“I’ve been known to say no.”
“Not to me.”
“Then you’ve been lucky so far.”
“Mmm. You playing a game, baby?
“No games. I just want a beer and maybe a game of pool.”
He looks at me. “Sure you do.”
* * *
The bar is arranged like an Irish pub, with some random seating, an L-shaped bar with a worn brass rail, and two pool tables at the back of the room. We claim one of those and Jack proceeds to make good on his promise to kick my ass at the game, which is not difficult since this is only the second attempt in my life and I can’t figure out how to hold the cue. Jack tries to demonstrate, but the cue is too big for my hands.
“I can’t hold my finger closed,” I say.
He circles to my side of the table and leans over me.
“Cock your thumb,” he says, “and slide the cue along the back. You want to make a bridge of your hand with a notch on top.”
He demonstrates, and I follow along. It still feels awkward, but my hand is more stable and I’m able to get off a solid—though poorly aimed—shot.
I look at Jack doubtfully.
“Better,” he says.
“You shouldn’t let your opponent teach you,” says a voice behind us.
I straighten and turn to see two men about my age, each with a mug of beer in his hand and wearing a Seahawks T-shirt. The blond in the baseball cap introduces himself as Tom, and says his heavyset friend is L.J.
“We stink at pool,” Tom says in the flat nonaccent of the Pacific Northwest. “But we’re bored and the other table’s in use.”
Jack rubs some chalk on the end of his cue. At first I think he’s going to refuse.
“As long as we’re not playing for money,” he says.
“What money?” says L.J.
We decide Jack and I will play together. Tom orders another round of beer and L.J. breaks, scattering the balls with a sound like a toy machine gun.
“We’re being hustled already,” Jack says good-naturedly.
“You’ve just seen my only move,” L.J. says.
It really is, too. L.J. is almost as bad as I am, and Tom almost as good as Jack. We play three games in a row, chatting idly. From the jukebox, a favorite song seduces me into motion, just a little, a rock of my hips and a slide, following the beat.
“Where are you two from?” Tom says.
“Seattle,” I say.
“Vashon,” Jack says at the same time.
“Hey, I used to live on Maury, near the lighthouse,” says L.J.
“Why did you leave?” I ask.
“To meet women,” he says, round belly bouncing once with a grunt of laughter.
“And how’s that working for you?”
“All the good ones are taken,” he says, eyeing me regretfully.
Jack is leaning over the table, lining up his shot. He throws a glance over his shoulder at L.J., draws back his cue and sinks the eight ball neatly in the corner pocket.
“Damn, that’s two out of three,” Tom says.
“We should’ve played for money, after all,” I say.
“What money?” L.J. says again.
“Everyone’s got something to gamble with,” Jack says. He straightens and looks L.J. in the eye. Though there’s nothing overtly threatening in Jack’s tone or body language, a frisson of unease passes through me.
Jack hangs up his cue and heads off to the men’s room, while Tom pays for another game and begins to arrange the rack.
“So what do you do for a living, Alice?” he says.
“I’m a writer.”
He glances up.
“Is that right. Anything I w
ould know?”
“I doubt it.”
He assumes an expression of offended dignity, one hand over his heart.
“I read.”
“Oh, I believe you.”
“No, you don’t,” he says, laughing.
I place the cue ball on the table and try again to perfect my bridge. Tom moves to my side of the table and stands next to me. I move a half step closer, a slight shift from left to right, and look up at him.
“Spread your fingers more,” he says. “And lock your elbow.”
He bends over me, takes hold of the end of the cue to show me how far to draw it back. His scent fills my nose, an unfamiliar blend of beer and aftershave, and I feel the heat of his body.
“You’re hesitating,” he says. “Push through, think of it like a tennis stroke.”
I lock my elbow and let the cue slide over my thumb. The ball shoots down the table and zips straight back.
“That was good,” he says.
His eyes are on my mouth, quickly to my breasts, back again. I’ve read that men don’t fantasize about the idea of a woman the way I do with men. They think of someone they’ve actually met, some real woman they’ve seen and wanted. And I know from Tom’s quick glance at my mouth, down my shirt, that this stranger will be using me tonight. When he’s home alone and the lights are out, he’ll have me bent over this pool table, and may even have ideas about the wooden cue I’m holding in my hands.
It’s an insult and a compliment at once. But I don’t have time to think about it. Jack has returned to the table.
“Time to go.” He takes my cue and hangs it on the wall rack. He shakes Tom’s hand. “Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, you, too,” Tom says. “Sure we can’t talk you into another game?”
Jack’s expression never changes, but his eyes are fixed on me as he answers.
“No, I think we’ve had about enough.”