Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  “Come on, Jess. You’re bad about that.”

  “No, I’m being serious. I’m not that bad, but he’s always like, ‘Why do you take that thing everywhere with you?’”

  “Why do you take it everywhere with you?”

  “Don’t do the stupid bit with me, Katie. I need it for work. I need to call you. And it’s at the point where I feel weird about taking a call, even an important call.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah. But it’s more than that. More than phones. We got pulled over, right? And he just pays this cop two hundred dollars—”

  “Two hundred!”

  “Yeah, I know. He paid the cop, and then it was like, nothing. No big deal. He didn’t even mention it when he got back in the car. Not because he was ashamed about it or anything, it was just no big deal. Normal. Routine.”

  “So, that freaks you out?”

  “Not the bribe, just the way he dealt with it. He was so smooth about it. Effortless. Any other guy, any other guy I know, anyway, would have bragged about getting away with it or something.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “And he’s never wrong about anything.”

  “Oh no, that posture.”

  “No, I’m not joking. I mean, literally, he’s never wrong about anything. Like, factually. He’s like an encyclopedia. I’ve stopped even trying to argue details with him. He’s a genius like that.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yes, so crazy. And even more, he’s just, Jesus, I don’t want to say manipulative. But people do what he wants. I do what he wants.”

  “That’s a scary feeling,” Katie says, and through the phone I can hear her slurping the dregs of something from a straw, probably one of her beloved iced coffee drinks.

  “It is scary.”

  “But a little exciting too. It’s like you’re along for the ride.”

  “Yes, Katie, that’s it, that’s it exactly.” And this is why I love my sister so.

  “But there’s the sex too.”

  “Don’t even get me started.”

  “Do you feel like he’s making you do that?”

  “God, no,” I say. “I want to do that all on my own.” And we laugh.

  I’m five minutes late getting back to the studio, but it’s no big deal. Josh and Gert are too involved with their newly assembled toy to even notice my entry. It looks like some shiny white piece of medical equipment, this scanner, with its keyboard and monitor and humming fan. There’s a big metal arm extended over the table, and Josh is seated in front of its display with Gert looking over his shoulder. It takes my bag dropping by the bathroom door to make them look up.

  “There she is,” Gert says. “Hey, Jess.”

  “Is it ready?” I ask. I go to the kitchen and get myself a glass from one of Josh’s nearly empty cupboards and fill it with water from the filtered carafe he keeps in the refrigerator.

  “It’s ready,” Josh says, turning some knob next to the display. “Are you?”

  “Guess so.”

  Gert holds my glass as I hop up onto the table. He’s got a pillow there for me, and some blocks of green foam.

  “We start with the knee today,” he says. “You want to take off the pants, or just pull up?” Gert says this with no emotion at all, purely clinical, and as I pull up the right leg of my pants—they’re sort of baggy and I can work the leg all the way up to the middle of my thigh—I suddenly realize that this towering Dutchman is going to, over the next week or so, be viewing every dimple, pore, and crevice on my body in sub-millimeter resolution.

  “Lie back, Jess. The foam is for under the knee.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Gert.” I stay up on my elbows so I can watch what’s going on.

  Gert doesn’t crack a hint of a smile as he places a tiny white sticker a few inches above my knee. “We being serious here now, Jess. Doc, can you give me the reference light?”

  I guess there could be worse people to see me totally naked. At least he takes it seriously.

  Josh presses a button in the control panel, and a dot of red light appears on the table next to me. Gert lowers the arm until it’s about a foot above my leg, moves it around until the light lines up with the little sticker, and nods.

  “Okay, Jess, you got to lie back all the way now. Put this on.” He hands me what looks like the type of eyeshades people wear on long plane rides, and points up to a pair of lenses on the underside of the arm. “Strong lasers,” he says.

  That’s good enough for me. I put on the eyeshades and let myself down to the pillow.

  The scanning procedure, at least in this trial run, seems very, very boring. For me, at least. Josh and Gert speak of grids and reference lights; axis X and axis Y. There are beeps and whirring sounds; joy at good results and dismay at poor ones. If it weren’t for all this talking, I might fall asleep.

  “There’s still some blur,” I hear Gert say.

  “She needs to be really still. Can you try not to breathe this time, Jess?” Josh asks.

  Well, sure, Josh. I can try that.

  After maybe an hour, it seems to be done. Josh and his student seem happy, excited even, and again they’re so distracted that I have to ask them if I can finally take off the eyeshades.

  “Oh, yeah, Jess, sorry,” Gert says. “Stay up there for a second, though, there’s a chance we might run one more.”

  “Let me go find Hoffman,” Josh says. “I want to see what he thinks about the resolution.”

  I pull off the shades and sit up, blinking at how bright the room seems. Josh takes off, leaving the door open behind him, and Gert types away at the keyboard on the scanner. There’s some cheesy pop music coming from one of the other studios, and when my eyes adjust enough and I look over at Gert, I see he’s just barely bobbing his head with the music while staring at the monitor.

  “You’re so busted,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I saw you moving to the beat.”

  “In Holland boys must learn rhythm during physical education,” he says without smiling or shifting his eyes from the screen. “It’s compulsory.”

  “Uh, okay,” I say. Gert may be a real-life weirdo.

  Then he does look at me, and he does smile, possibly the first smile I’ve ever seen out of him. “It’s a joke, Jess. You know, to be funny.”

  I’d throw the pillow at him, but I’m worried I’d break the scanner.

  Josh sticks his head in the door. “It’s okay, we don’t need to do another one,” he calls. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You believed me,” Gert says after Josh is gone.

  “You’re mean.” I move myself over to the edge of the table to get down. Gert’s backpack is there, a very hip-looking leather and chrome buckles kind of thing, and as I slide myself toward the side I accidentally knock it off the table. There’s a clattering sound as it hits the floor.

  “Shit,” I say. “Sorry.” I look down and realize what the sound was: a box of 100cc syringes has come out of the top of the pack and spilled its contents out across the floor. “Oh. Um.”

  The funny little bonding levity I was just feeling is gone; Gert shooting heroin is a secret I really did not want to know about. I stay up on the table, and suddenly feel very uncomfortable with the thought of him seeing me naked.

  “It’s okay,” Gert says, coming over to scoop up the syringes and get them back into the box. He stands up with a handful of them and holds them out to me, right up in front of my face, and I recoil.

  “You need some clean needles?”

  “No, no.”

  “Jess,” he says. Chiss. Then I realize he’s pulling up the side of his tee shirt, and there’s a little pager-like thing clipped onto his belt.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “It’s an insulin pump.”

  “Oh, God, Gert, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, I know what you were thinking. And I am from Holland and all that.”

  “Stop it, I’m sorry.”

&nbs
p; “I know you are.” And he offers his hand to help me down from the table.

  Spaghetti was fine for the camping trip and all, but I don’t think I could handle it one more night. So I lobby for take-out; there’s a Chinese place we’ve discovered less than a block away that has the most sublime Mu Shu crepes. I lobby hard, and win.

  We eat quietly, me reading my golf resort materials and Josh the scanner manual. I’ve poured myself a glass of wine, but I’m feeling kind of worn out and dehydrated, and it seems like Josh is taking more sips from it than I am.

  “Sorry,” he says when I give him a funny look. “It looked like, you know, you weren’t having much.”

  I think I’m turning him. Ha!

  “You finish it,” I say.

  Josh’s only response is to pull the glass over to his side of the table.

  In the bathroom I strip down to my underwear. Wash face, brush teeth, don Josh’s high school “scholar athlete” tee shirt that has become my sleepy-time uniform for nights spent here at the studio.

  Which, as noted, has been most nights lately.

  I get my folder of resort specs from the table and start up the steps to the loft and Josh tells me he’ll be up in a little bit. There’s a cute halogen lamp next to my side of the futon, and the pillows are of such a perfect density that I can prop myself up and not worry about slouching or slipping down. It’s ideal. I lean back with my pile of photos and look at massage tables and pool slides and a restaurant right by the tenth tee.

  After twenty minutes of taking mental notes on the pictures, I hear Josh climbing up into the loft. He’s undressed too, down to a dark gray pair of briefs. I keep looking at my golf stuff, sort of. He has a stretching routine he does every night—touching toes, locking wrists, raising arms. Maybe it’s something like yoga, but the cadence seems more like he learned it by watching a fitness show on public television. He stretches, with his back to me, and I watch the muscles beneath the skin of the lean body I’ve come to know.

  When he’s done, he turns and paces at the foot of the bed, looking at me. It’s almost feline, the way he’s moving. That seems like a silly way to describe it, but it’s what comes to my mind. And the resort plans aren’t giving me much to hide behind.

  “You should take off your clothes,” he says. Pacing.

  I neaten up the papers across my chest and stomach, put the folder down on the floor, and reach for the lamp.

  “Leave that on,” he says. He’s stopped moving.

  I roll back to look at him. My arms are close to my sides; my legs are closed.

  “Does the light have to stay?”

  “Take off that shirt. Your panties. Take them off.”

  That ridiculous word, “panties,” coming from his mouth, so seriously, almost makes me laugh. But I don’t.

  “That doesn’t seem quite fair. What about you?”

  “I’m not talking about me. Take them off.”

  I do, and he begins to pace again. Looking. He raises his arms over his head and stretches his neck and shoulders. My legs stay closed, and all the time he’s looking.

  “Roll over,” he says.

  “Josh…”

  “Roll over. Onto your stomach.”

  “Josh, come on. Come lie down with me.”

  “Roll over.”

  I do it. My arm goes around a pillow and my legs stay closed, and I feel his eyes as he paces, on my back and everywhere else. And I hear him pause to slide off his briefs and clear his throat.

  “Get up on your knees.”

  I’m shaking. “Josh, I don’t know if I can do—”

  “Up on your knees.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to fuck you.”

  The word—that word!—is an explosion in the room; in my head it’s like a pin going through a balloon. It’s not like there was any question it was going to happen, but the statement, the proclamation…I’ve never heard him talk like this. I’ve never seen him act like this. And this game, this ritual, of words or bodies or anything else—whatever it is, it seems suddenly more serious and maybe a little bit frightening.

  “Get up on your knees.”

  I do it. Clutching the pillow with my eyes squeezed shut, I do it. My butt is up in the air and he’s down behind me, and I feel his hands inside my knees, pushing them farther apart. Then there’s nothing. His hands on my hips, and a long moment of nothing.

  My eyes are closed.

  “Are you going to?” I finally make myself whisper.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “You do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it.”

  I take a breath and almost speak, and—did I say it?—he is, God, he is, and I’m thrown forward with an “Oh!” and I catch myself with my right arm, the arm not around the pillow, my arm is up, bracing myself, elbow at the wall and palm flat to try to hold myself steady against each of his manic jabs. Now my head is bumping the wall, too much, it’s too much, he’s got my hair, and I’ve got my left hand up now too to try to hold myself away and push myself back toward him, this man, this man, whatever he is. My hand between my legs and then back up again, it’s too much, something, there’s a pace or a spot or some thing that he gets that makes me shout, I hate that I shout, I hate that I can’t shut my mouth and every time I shout he does it again, and harder.

  And harder, and there’s nothing, just me and this wall and this man.

  Then there is shouting, and the room is back; we’re both shouting. There’s a frenzy, and a slowing. Arms around my waist and I let my legs slide flat. Josh rolls to my left side, his arm around me, breathing “oh, oh, oh” into the pulse in my neck.

  I reach out and turn off the light.

  Our breathing slows, and I grab his old shirt and my underwear and get up and scramble down to the bathroom. I leave the light off when I go in, though. I’m a little afraid to see myself, sitting there, in the mirror on the wall. Josh didn’t need to ask if I did. He knows I did. The window is gone.

  I can’t turn on the light. I’m afraid to see my own face.

  15

  Over the next two days, the entirety of both of my legs is scanned in three dimensions, up and down, front and back. It didn’t take long on Tuesday morning to realize that the eyeshades would be too oppressive for however long this phase of the project is going to take, so Gert ran off and returned with a pair of light stands from one of the photo studios, between which he hung a sheet with document binding clips to shield me from the deadly force of the scanner’s “strong lasers.”

  With the sheet up to protect me, I have two options during scanning. If I’m on my back, I can read. If I’m on my stomach, I can read, or, even better, I can write in the spiral notebook I’ve appropriated from Josh. And in this manner I manage to compose a few stellar pages of copy for the golf resort lodging brochure.

  On Wednesday night, after the last of my left heel has been digitized and stored and backed up, Josh and I go out for dinner at a sushi place not far from my apartment. Over miso soup I delicately suggest that I may stay home—alone—tonight so I can shower in my own tub and be with my own things. He seems fine with this; we kiss before he boards the bus to take him back to the vicinity of the Academy, and I walk to my apartment.

  There has been no talk of Monday night’s fury, but it’s been impossible to push it from my mind. Josh was his normal self the morning after, and there has been no hint that it might happen again. I don’t know whether I should consider the episode to be an anomaly, or if there is some potential for reoccurrence.

  I also don’t know if I wish for one or the other.

  I see no lights on at Patrick’s as I come down my street. It is getting late, though. And at least my plants seem more enthusiastic this visit. I take a deliriously long, hot-water-depleting shower that leaves me so relaxed I don’t need to resort to alternative measures to fall into a prompt and perfect slumber.

  I’m confused in t
he morning, being in my own bed and not having to fight through a wine hangover, a condition that lately borders on chronic. It’s early, and barely light, and I get the crazy notion that I can make up for my lack of recent exercise if I get up like now and walk all the way across the city to the Academy. Yes. I am going to do this. And maybe the fact that there’s little chance I’ll see Patrick this early is weighing into it, but the workout is what I’m really selling myself.

  I find myself some running shorts and dig around in my bottom drawer for a tank before remembering that there is a box containing dozens of articles of high-performance women’s sportswear next to my desk, so I pad over and find myself a cute top, sage green in color and sleeveless. We’re going to be scanning my arms today; what could be better than a sleeveless top? In the event that I need to do something civilized, a button-down and plain skirt go into my bag along with a pair of sandals.

  It takes a little less than an hour to get from my place to the Academy. It’s chilly in the morning, and I’m happy I grabbed a jacket. There isn’t even much traffic yet, just buses growling by and the early morning joggers and spandex bike commuters and me.

  The city in the morning, with me, walking quickly through it, is surprisingly pleasant.

  The door to the studio is open when I get there. Josh is gone but Gert is over at the sink and it looks like he’s doing dishes.

  “Hey, Gert. Where’s Josh?”

  “Looking for coffee.”

  My feet feel hot and tingly from the walk and I sit down on the floor to pull off my shoes and my socks, and just as I do so Gert shouts “Ah!” and makes a long sucking “shhhh” sound. When I stand up to see what has happened, there’s Gert, standing in the middle of the kitchenette, biting his lip in a wince and cradling his right hand in his left while a trickle of deep red blood spills out and down to the floor.

  “Oh God, are you okay?” I run over and grab a clean kitchen towel, trying unsuccessfully to step around the red Rorschach puddle on the linoleum tile with my bare feet.

  “I broke the glass.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “It’s bad,” he says. I reach forward with the towel, and he offers his hand to me. “My blood is safe, Jess. I don’t have anything. Ah, I broke the damn glass.”