Stabs at Happiness (6 page)

The American woman is tanned, with white flesh where her bikini would protect her from the sun. Her breasts are large and white, with big nipples and pink aureoles.

She lies on her back, one leg entangled in the lemon-yellow sheets. There is makeup on her face. The mascara is smudged. Her lipsticked mouth is open, as are her eyes, which are as blue as the blue on the American flag.

The entry wound is not much to see. The exit wound, which is not visible so long as she lies undisturbed, is something else. It is from this latter wound that almost all of the blood has come. Most of this blood is turning brown; but when they lift her from the bed they find some quantity that is yet relatively fresh, sticky, wet red.

There is money strewn around her, some of it bloody. The detectives chatter with animation about this curious facet of the case. They walk all over, flashbulbs flashing: nothing is concealed from their eyes.

The other body is on the terrace. There is a pistol in his hand. The bullet seems to have entered at the right temple and exited from the rear left-hand side of the skull, taking with it a good portion of the brain.

His eyes are open. They look afraid. It's hard to get the gun out of his locked fingers so that the scene of the crime may be rearranged.

Colonel Sanchez Mosquera, advancing, has Fidel virtually surrounded, but does not realize this fact. Due to faulty map-reading, he does not know where he is. He has no idea that his force outnumbers that of the rebels by more than three to one. His men are tired; morale is low. They are not used to this terrain.

During the next three days of occasional fighting, Sanchez Mosquera's battalion is decimated. The High Command then panics, exaggerating to themselves the extent of the defeat. The advance is halted; the army begins to withdraw. Desertions are heavy.

She goes out to the Sky Club with a journalist named Enrique, and gets drunk.

Mariarosa's sugar-daddy got her released, in return for which Leonora has been showing extensive gratitude to one of his friends, another fat American in his fifties, most of whose desires she dislikes. All he wants is her ass. He thinks she's stupid because of her accent when she speaks English. But he's set her up in a new apartment. Her old home, her father's house, was completely trashed and vandalized, nearly demolished, during the time she was away.

The last remnant of a violet-red bruise on her left cheekbone is covered up by Max Factor makeup.

She thinks that things will change, and that there will be all kinds of reforms after Batista is gone. She talks about Fidel.

Enrique is much more pessimistic. But he doesn't contradict her, because he wants to take her to bed.

O
NLINE CHASE YIELDS
a thin Asian indie-type boy, 23, more and more beautiful the longer Nikki stares at the pixilated blank face. He goes by Taj but when they agree to meet he signs this email Justin Chen.

Nikki has not had actual sex with a woman here in New York for almost a year, but she's the sort of not-too-butch young alt dyke who emo girls like to make out with—or be seen making out with—in all kinds of situations these days. The Club Europa is where dropdead stiletto-heeled Polish, Czech and Ukraine blondes will almost always consent to dance with her to nonstop sleazy techno, smoke machine, on the zebra-striped dancefloor, which tends to metamorphose in a sinister manner when you're high on a hallucinogen concocted by some dweeb chemistry major who sees experimenting with such variants of Ecstasy as 2c-b and 2c-i as imaginary extra-credit unsanctioned by any oversight committee here on planet earth.

That's when it really fucking rocks to fall onto one of those beat-up red velvet couches with your tongue jammed in the Absinthe Minded Martini-flavored mouth of Natasha 9 or Ludmilla 6 while the electrical gridwork of your physique pulsates in sine waves to the blessed warmth.

Lately though, Nikki hasn't even been looking that much at girls on the internet, other than for the sake of baseline images to use in generating entirely fictional scenarios – usually far beyond a mere “date”—so that she can masturbate and cum for the sake of metaphysical hygiene… get dirty to be clean.

On one of the blogs where she likes to hang out Nikki as
NineOh
said that when she is ravished by some random girl's image, she never knows whether she wants to
Fuck
Her or
Be
Her. She asked others: Which is it for you? Would you rather fuck this object of desire or become them? And I mean really, like if you actually gave it a lot of thought?

There were some gorgeous answers, just in terms of people defining themselves, trying to anyway, trying to define their ideals. But they played the game differently. They said Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey, Kim Gordon, Arthur Rimbaud, the young Robert Mapplethorpe. Enormous half-guessed bios and complex mythologies were attached to these names, making use of all kinds of preexisting resonant material. No one just posted an anonymous photo and said:
That One
. Instead, they felt a pull, they wanted it both ways, simultaneously (impossibly)
Fucking That Hero
or
Heroine
and
Having That Career / Having Made That Art
.

Nikki on the other hand out of nowhere becomes entranced by some self-possessed unknown girl just captured for one anonymous instant, and she has no idea what such a person's daily interior life might be like (because this person would most likely not be the usual predictable professional model)—and if this girl walked towards her, met her eyes, out of a mirror or on the street, and telepathically said: “
Do you want to switch?
” so that she would become
Nikki
and
Nikki
would become her —Nikki likes to think she would say
Yes!

(No doubt she would try to fuck her as well.)

Justin Chen as
Taj
said he wanted to be Egon Schiele. That was pretty cool. That was okay.

In email he said, “i think i'm basically submissive sexually because i'm so lazy, so fucking passive about life. i kind of like to just lie there and let things happen and think about it, but not really thinking, more like being hypnotized.”

This when Justin already knows Nikki desires to fuck him with a strap-on. She has found it works best to say this right away. Justin Chen knows she's a dyke. That's a lot of why he's attracted to her. She's told him how boys are usually blown away by how much they love it, surrendering while being fucked. It's a whole other trip.

“There are so many nerve-endings in there for pleasure. You'll probably cum just from the stimulation of your prostate.”

“Fantastic,” Justin said then, on the phone. He's so deadpan.

Now she's on her way to rendezvous with him in Williamsburg.

Nikki has brown hair, buzzcut so short her well-shaped skull is right there. The hair in this state is super-soft, she loves to rub it against the grain. She has all kinds of rings in both earlobes and up on the antehelix of each ear, a ring in her left nostril, full kissy lips. She's lithe and fit, wearing a charcoal-gray corduroy blazer over an olive t-shirt, khaki cargo pants and well-worn docs.

It's just getting dark as she nears the bar where Justin awaits. The failing city is radiant in the dusk, just for a few moments, smell of infernal industry emanating from hidden regions underground.

Swoops of letters spraypainted over other letters in other colors create an indecipherable Babylonian scrawl. There are chalked outlines of bodies splayed on the wide sidewalk before a gone-out-of-business bookstore. All kinds of noises fight each other and intermingle here in this dominion of cement.

Inside the beat-up red door, the bar has exposed brick walls, candlelit tables for two. Nikki sees Justin at once. He's laid back, possibly shy. He is already drinking sambucca so Nikki decides to have that too.

He says they can go to his place in a while. He lives with his mother these days; father and older brother are in Taiwan. His mother is going through a midlife crisis or something and so she has plans almost every night.

“She's still hot. You know how it's hard to guess the age of some attractive Asian women? She's like that. But she doesn't want me to know her business, so she disguises her activities— with a lot of shit that isn't real.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like supposedly doing yoga, then volunteering at least one night a week reading out loud to quadriplegics and shit. She's also in an amateur chamber group, playing the flute. But I know that she has a boyfriend. She stays out all night, and she keeps buying an awful lot of new clothes. She's afraid I'll talk shit about her to my dad.”

“Do you talk to him very often?”

“No, never.” Justin laughs.

“What about your brother?”

“No. We've never been too close. He just wants to be a multi-millionaire. What about your parents?”

“Oh, they've been divorced forever,” Nikki says. She doesn't want to discuss any of that. Her father and mother both live in L.A. Nikki was a whizkid student for a while and started UCLA at 16.

The tables have these notebooks you can write in with colored pens.

I'd like to suicide-bomb you,
she writes, turns it so he can see.

Let's do it together,
he writes in return.

Then when Nikki doesn't seem inclined to write any more messages, Justin says out loud: “First let's write our autobiographies really fast on these napkins and stick them in each other's pockets without looking.”

“Yeah, sure,” she says, the little twisted smile reflecting that she thinks he's just in effect a good student. “Whatever,” she says, taking a sip of her drink, not meaning the word in an unfriendly way.

“Don't whatever me,” he says, and she laughs then. She thinks he's cute.

He tells her about some website which will endlessly generate insults North Korean communist-style, like, “You politically illiterate gangster, you have glaringly revealed your true colors; we will transform your country into a sea of fire!”

Nikki smiles, nodding, by her expression asking for more. He waits before filling the empty space.

“You loud-mouthed aggressor, we will mercilessly crush you with the weapon of our single-hearted unity!”

Nikki is amused, yet at the same time doesn't like it that this sounds like something he's done before. The music getting louder.

Justin says, “Should we go? My mom will be out bowling or something in a Motel 6 most of the night.”

They take a cab to a part of Williamsburg she doesn't recognize. She tries to notice the street names. Vandervoort? Monitor? It's dark now. The streetlights tint everything amber to burnt-orange.

The Chens' apartment is on the fifth floor of an old building with a very slow rickety elevator, the kind of elevator you see in films when someone's going to suddenly come out of the shadows with a gleaming big knife. It's a large apartment with a lot of green fronds and other plants, a dark polished hardwood floor, and a small white poodle who appears, barking. Justin has a hard time shutting it up.