See You in Paradise (21 page)

YOUR TONGUE, forming forbidden words inside your closed mouth

A SET OF JUNIOR BARBELLS, the plastic weights grown brittle and split along the seams so that sand has spilled out, which he cannot bring himself to discard, even though they remind him, every time he works out on his state-of-the-art cable-based bodybuilding system, of a time when he was weak and at the mercy of his father, who was the one who bought him the junior barbells in the first place, and against whom he mercilessly retaliated as soon as he was strong enough to do so, a retaliation that his father, lying prostrate on the shag rug with his face bent and bloodied, seemed, with a wry, knowing, split-lipped smile, to tacitly approve of and even take proud responsibility for

TRIPLE-WASHED MIXED GREENS in a plastic bag, on a shelf beside others like it

GRIT found encrusted in the tire wells of the suspect’s car that, after extensive testing in a forensic geology laboratory, proves to have come from a beach in Oregon the suspect claims never to have visited

THE FATHER’S BELT, which the mother matches, as the child sleeps, to the scars on the child’s back, scars the child insisted came from falling against a schoolyard fence during a “shirts vs. skins” game of kickball

A BISCUIT crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot

THE ORANGE TOBOGGAN whisking her to her death

THE CASSETTE TAPE that happened to be in the tape deck when it was stolen from a car and was still lodged there when you bought the stolen deck for thirty bucks from a collapsible buffet table set up on the sidewalk outside your office building, and which contained, as you learned the moment you installed the deck and turned it on, a desperate recorded plea for reconciliation from a weeping woman to the lover who spurned her, which fills you with both pity and delight to hear, pity because of her plaintive voice and the blurred, haunted quality of the recording, delight because the offending lover’s tape deck has been stolen

A BUMPER STICKER, affixed to the inside of a women’s room stall door, bearing the name and telephone number of a rape crisis center that has lost its funding and is no longer operating

THE PASSPORT PHOTOS on which your eyes are obscured by little white bars

THE TUBE OF UNGUENT tightly rolled at the empty end, which she is just about to realize has been leaking all over the contents of her purse for days

THE TEST RESULTS from the genetics lab that his hands are shaking too hard to open