When Watched (16 page)

“You're like a radiant corpse,” she said to the man in her bed. She had wanted to say it for days.

“I know,” he said brightly, looking up from his book. He was older than she was. “I get exhausted,” he explained. “I really do. But then I get excited.”

“Then you forget your body,” she added.

“I really do,” he smiled.

“You'll be on your deathbed,” she said. “And then you'll get excited.”

“And then I'll live for ten more years,” he said, returning to his book.

She chucked her head back with a laugh. “You'll be like, I forgot to die.”

He laughed too. He liked her cavalier attitude toward death—his death. Perversely it relaxed him.

She moved the sheet off her naked chest and wanted to kiss him but instead stared, which felt tantric—a slow burn.

He didn't mind being stared at. He felt the measured heat of
her gaze and soaked it up like sunshine. Being loved—it was exactly like being at the beach. She was the sun and the ocean and the hot sand too, enclosing him in airy pressure.

She went on staring with her head on its side. She could tell he hadn't been handsome as a younger guy. But age had pushed his face into another dimension. He was handsome now. It was so often like this for funny-looking young men, she thought. Funny looked better later—rotting.

And it was just the opposite for baby-faced heartbreakers. They aged into ugly guys, she thought. All of them did. Because their perfect soft beauty wore down and all you could see was that it was gone.
They age like women . . . old peaches,
she thought, smiling wide.

He wasn't looking at her but he could hear the wet sound of her teeth being revealed. It was like a wolf breaking out of a child's face.

“Tell me about acid,” she said because she'd never done it. She really wanted to but feared the things she'd do, slice her arm open or just stare into the mirror and into herself, going permanently insane.

“I already did.”

“Tell me again. Tell me about looking at money.”

“Well I remember looking at a dollar—the pyramid. It seemed like a religion.” He set his book down. “This one guy who wasn't tripping—he was leading us—he decided we should eat pizza. And it was the kind of pizza with bubbles—you know, like airholes. So it looked like it was happening in front of us.”

“Happening in front of you?”

“When you're tripping nothing is still so it wasn't just a pizza that had a few bubbles—it was like it was bubbling right there. Like it was the surface of Mars blowing up. And you
would no more think about eating this thing than you would think about throwing your face down on lava and licking. It was the craziest thought in the world. So we were like scared children and of course this guy was laughing.”

She smiled giddily, loving the story and his face as he told it. And she knew it was a kind of sickness, how she fell so hard and wore her weird heart on her sleeve like a little hungry roach. “I love that you did so many drugs,” she said and felt like a moron. What she meant was “I love you.”

“I never wanted to be anything,” he said. “I just wanted to feel good.”

She nodded and thought to herself that he was still living that life.

“I was a pleasure kid,” he said.

She smiled. “I don't know if I am.”

“I think you are.”

“I might be a masochist.”

“No.” He shook his head as if to say that he had fucked many young masochists and was therefore an expert. “You like to feel good,” he commented.

She lay there and considered her own existence, coating and enslaving her. Did she like to feel good? Sure. Good and then blank. She loved this man and would soon feel nothing for him. Even in the heat of her love she could feel the devil peering, waiting to enter her.
The devil is blankness,
she thought, hating what she contained. It was why she didn't want to do acid. Evil was too close. It lived in her cells and yearned to sing.

He was getting tired. He set his book down and looked into her blinking eyes. Then at once she asked: “Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Really and truly?”

“Deeply and terribly.”

She smiled like a fiend and he joined her there. Then, “Look at your hair,” he said, giving it a stroke. “It's so
brown
.”

Her smile fell. “What does that mean?”

“It's unaltered by time,” he clarified. “A tree full of leaves!”

“Oh.” She grinned then, happy to be a tree and a full one. Though it was certainly strange to be stroked for having lived less. And stranger to love him for having lived more.

Her gaze seesawed around the room and landed on a
Ghostbusters
DVD. It lived with the books on a nearby shelf, like it was hiding.

“You like Bill Murray?” she asked.

“What?”

She pointed to the DVD.

“Oh. Someone left that here.”

“I would watch it. I like Bill Murray,” she said, cocking her head at the bookshelf as if it were Bill himself. “He's looked the same for twenty years. I mean old but never
older
.”

“I know,” the man grinned. “He's like my apartment.”

That made her laugh. Then she settled her face into the crook of his neck and felt how awake she was.

He switched off the light.

“Do you still love me?” she said.

“Since a moment ago?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It's the last thing I think about before I go to sleep,” he said. And then he did.

She exhaled. It was such a good answer. Her heart thumped against his dreaming body and she wanted desperately to join
him there. She had read that people sleeping in the same bed—people in love—could quite literally inhabit the same dream.

But she wanted a cigarette badly. The door called to her. And soon, without even really deciding to, she was walking toward it.

Outside the air was soft on her legs as she walked, lit cigarette in hand. It was the way she wished she felt in the morning but only felt at night, full of intelligence and curiosity. Not optimistic—not at all—just focused and hungry and on a path.

She stopped outside a bar and lingered in the red light, flicking her cigarette into a dark puddle and lighting another. It was then that she noticed someone—a small person—walking toward her. It was a child, a little boy, getting nearer and nearer. Soon he stood very close and said, “Hi.”

She took a step back, then smiled with fear and wonder. “Are you alright?” she asked.

The boy said “Yes” with a kind of adult conviction. It made her stare.

“Where's your mom?”

“She's at home.”

Her gaze lingered. He looked so relaxed.

“She's always home,” he continued. “I was born in the bathtub.”

“Oh I've heard of that.”

“When I was out of her my mom said what is it? And my dad said a baby.” The boy laughed and laughed at himself. When she joined in, his laugh got even more hysterical.

They caught their breath and were quiet a moment. “How old are you?” She squinted.

“Nine,” he said flatly, as if feeling no connection to the number.

“I remember nine,” she grinned. “It was a good year.”

He looked into her eyes very deeply and she shifted in her daisy dress and tennis shoes. Then suddenly, as if he'd heard a bell, the boy backed away, said “Bye,” and walked into the bar.

She stood there a second dumbfounded, then walked toward one of the grimy windows. Inside she saw the boy standing next to a stool with a man on it. She felt certain it was his father. It had to be.

Jabbing her cigarette out on the brick wall, she had a vision of the boy as a grown man, kind of fucked up from spending night after night with his dad at a bar. She figured he would live in bars though he hated them, the dark crib of his life.
You never stop being nine,
she thought and felt like a genius. It was thrilling when she had an idea and it felt true. Some back door in her heart flew open and she had the sensation of leaving the ground, for a second anyway.

But no, not everyone was permanently nine, she decided. Some people were four. Others fifteen.
And all of us walking around with our older faces, relating as adults but feeling like children,
she thought. It was why actual children looked like celebrities—spiritual celebrities. They were so full of truth, she thought, and not just their own. It was the great secret of humanity and it whirled in their eyes.

She had a bunch more cigarettes as she walked on. She felt the air kissing her ears and neck and thanked God for it. She could only thank God for a few things, the things that were always good to her. Because otherwise God seemed to be jerking off on a hill somewhere with gleaming eyes, watching her fuck up. But the
air
was good, it always was. And the moon was good. So good. Even the rats were good the way they waddled with such speed—such
desire
. “I love you,” she whispered. To all rats.

She went back to the man's apartment with a racing heart
and took all her clothes off, then crawled into bed. She had used his key so as not to wake him but he did stir when she started climbing over him, kissing up the front of his T-shirt.

He laughed in a groggy way and stuck one hand in the mess of her hair.

“I want you so bad,” she muttered into his shirt.

“But you have me,” he said, sitting up.

The light stayed off but moonlight from the window showed her what his face was doing. He was looking at her like she was a puppy who had eaten all his shoes. And she felt like one.

She sat up and he held her face in his hands. She was so beautiful, he thought. But beautiful like a junkie, all wild and skinny and freaked out. “What's going on?” he asked.

“I don't know. I feel funny. I don't want to lose you.”

“Why would you lose me?”

“Because we're fucking.”

“So?”

“Everyone who fucks someone stops fucking them at some point. And then they start fucking someone else.”

“Do you want to fuck someone else?”

“No! But it's inevitable, right? One day one of us'll wake up an—”

“Don't do this.”

“Okay.” She took a breath. “Wait. Don't do what?”

“Tamper with perfection.”

She stared a second, then nodded. “Okay.”

He rubbed his eyelids and sighed. “Like every time I've become obsessed with the I Ching it becomes sort of
loathsome
.”

“That's such a weird thing to say. I don't even know what you mean.”

“I just mean you shouldn't think so much . . . about chance.”

“Tell me about acid.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“God.” He shook his head.
“Why?”

“I don't know. Just tell me.”

“Well . . . it's like living in a poem,” he said, relaxing into his pleasure. “It's cartoon and allegory . . . and the allegory goes as deep as you do.”

“That's beautiful.”

“It really is. You should do it already.”

“No. I think I just like hearing about it.”

He squinted at her. “You're a strange creature,” he said, grasping her naked arm and giving it a squeeze.

“You think we'll love each other for a while?” she asked.

“Yes,” he grinned. “Absolutely.”

“You could die while fucking me. I mean doesn't that happen?”

“What?”

“When you do Viagra.”

“I don't do it that much.” He started stroking her arm. “I think you're gonna have me for longer than you expect. I'm gonna be like a telephone hanging around . . . there'll be nothing left, just this voice that's me that won't go away,” he said.

It made her laugh. Then a long pause. Then she said, “Why do you like me? I'm such a grump.”

“That's what I'm into.”

“And I'm stupid.”

“You are not.”

“I can't remember the things I'm supposed to and you
know
it. My mind gets crowded with other things . . .”

“I love your mind. It's not some dumb grove where all the trees look the same.”

She looked at him then and thought that he could've been anything he wanted. A poet, maybe, or a filmmaker or a novelist. But she was glad he wasn't any of those things. She was glad he was lying there in the moonlight, a big sexy nobody who could've been somebody. There was something so rich about it.

“Just enjoy this,” he said.

“Because it's gonna end?”

“No. Because it's
good
.” He shook his head with a little smile. “You're so morbid.”

“I thought everyone was.”

“Not like this.” He put his hand over her heart and felt its mad flutter. “Breathe.”

It turned her on, him telling her to breathe.

He said it again.
“Breathe.”

Hank was on the sofa when his wife called. He hadn't moved much in an hour.

“My flight was delayed,” Lenora said.

“Shit.”

“Now I'm eating this really pathetic sandwich,” she said and paused—maybe glaring at it. “It's weird not eating red meat. I'm now one of those people who asks if the chili has meat in it. And of course it
did
. So I was condemned to the broccoli and cheese soup. Then I got really wild and bought the Tuscan turkey sub—which is all language. It's really just the worst kind of turkey.”

“The turkey that's really bologna.”

“Exactly.”

They were quiet a second, a low snarl of static between them.

“A lot of other people are on their phones,” Lenora said. “It's how we wait. We
evacuate
.” She paused quite vividly this time. Hank saw her cool blue eyes darting around the fluorescent hall of space.

“Anyone who isn't on their phone is
eating
,” she said
disgustedly. “Couples mostly, but none of them are looking at each other. Eating has become this . . . grim religious practice.”

Hank laughed. “I love you.”

“There's a big neon sign that says toasty—bread that's going bad that's been toasted.”

“I wish I was there with you.”

“No you don't.” Lenora took a breath as if she were about to say more but didn't. She was prone to exactly this sort of pause in a conversation as she was often distracted.

“Did you hear from Tom?” Hank asked. Tom was Lenora's agent. She had sent him the first half of her new manuscript, a novel about a female drug mule called
The Donkey Show
.

Lenora had spent the past year meeting with an actual drug mule—Angie—for research. She had read an article about the drug bust online and grew very curious about the sort of woman who boards an afternoon plane with giant packets of heroin stuffed up into the chamber of her vagina. Lenora became obsessed with Angie and soon began visiting her in jail with a tape recorder.

Secretly it made Hank a little sick.

“He loved it,” she said.

“What? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“But I had to ask.”

“He said it was satisfying.” She let out a huff.

“Oh come on. Who cares what he
said
?”

“It was sleazy,” she said and resumed her distracted silence, which seemed now to contain annoyance.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She paused a second more. “That I should try to do some work while I'm stuck here. I have that contest I'm judging.”

“The stories?”

“Yeah.”

He scratched some dried food off the thigh of his jeans, flicked it into the air. “I love you,” he said. “I'm sorry you're stuck there.”

“It's actually kind of nice. I like that nobody knows who I am—I
like
being nobody.” She went quiet again. “I'll call you later.”

“Okay. Tell your mom uh—tell her hello.”

“Hello?”

“Well. Give her my love.”

“She might not remember you.”

He blinked into space.

“Hank, she hardly recognizes
me
.”

“Tell her anyway,” he said, weirdly hurt.

“I will.”

Hank hung up and sank back into the sofa, looking around. Before him hung an oil painting of three milk cartons filled with yellow and orange roses. It didn't give him any sort of feeling—never had.

Everything they owned came from an antique store, which seemed eerie to him, like they had no history. He felt like a visitor in the home of another man—a very important man who wrote book after book and fucked Lenora constantly.

Dazedly he pictured her naked chest, soft with a pale explosion of freckles and one red birthmark that she loathed. It lived under one of her breasts and resembled a little spoon. “I love it,” he would say to her in bed, putting his face near the spoon. Then she'd roll her whole naked self away, pull the sheet up, and groan.

Hank sat there picturing it—the spoon. The moment of seeing it before she turned. He wondered what Lenora was
thinking about at that moment.
Her mother? Another man? Existence?

The love always came this way—like a mallet. And then he saw stars. It didn't feel good—the pictures that hovered at the front of his skull: Lenora kissing up the zipper of his jeans, then peeking up to say what she said once, four years ago: “I can't believe I can have this.”

“What?”

“You.”

 • • • 

Hank woke up an hour later. He ran his tongue over the lemony fur on his teeth and swallowed—revolted, then shut his eyes again and lay there, tipping in and out of consciousness.

In a fog he observed whole hours fleeing his life forever. He kept picturing what he would do if he could move. Make a roast beef sandwich with mustard. Masturbate. Write seventy pages without stopping. Or pee—suddenly he really had to. He ignored the urge but it waged on and on and soon he had a vision of himself soaking the sofa.

I'm a neglected dog,
he thought and then realized that in this scenario he was also the abusive owner.

Lenora had a theory about dog training that he never forgot. “You give them a treat when they're good,” she said. “But only
sometimes
. No dog should be rewarded every time.”

Hank considered the chronic hope of a dog trained this way, a dog made to wonder:
Will she give it to me now? How bout now?
It seemed cruel to melt a being down like that—to nothing but desire.

Outside a bottle shattered and he was grateful for it. They lived on Riverside Drive and generally there was no one in sight,
just joggers—haggard, anorexic ones. Maybe there were some kids out there, he thought, a smile on his lips.
Getting tanked.

Hank glared down at his body, then ordered himself to stand. He felt tired, flabby and separate from the universe. Like an athlete without a team. Or a sport.

The apartment was dark and manicured, a long hall with the occasional foreign object on a shelf: an eel trap, a ceremonial African hat, a yellow-eyed devil in a shadow box. It seemed so many steps to the bathroom.

Hank had read that most depressed people didn't know they were depressed, which fascinated him—being that he was so acutely aware of his own depression.
This should feel good,
he thought when the arc of urine crashed into the toilet.
It doesn't.

He didn't wash his hands. He ran a green comb through his hair and turned before the mirror, examining his stomach in profile—the low mound. Then he gazed at his mouth, which had a slight duck quality.
Quack,
he thought, shutting his lips.
Quack, quack.

It was a face that had been called strange as many times as it had been called—not
handsome
, not that word—but as many times as it had been kissed.

Hank returned to the sofa and crawled onto it. Loneliness stabbed him all over.
But what is it called when your loneliness is worse around other people?
He shut his eyes.
Surely there's some long German word for that.

Hank wished he were writing. He had written one good book but the world didn't think so. Then he wrote another book but he didn't love it and neither did the world. Now he was thirty-nine. He thought about his age every day. He also thought he would never write again.

He wondered how many other people were lying miserably on sofas in Manhattan.
A fucking lot,
he thought. Night had come down through the windows and across the room in long furry slabs. It made him understand suicide—the darkness did. A desire to take the night and put it inside oneself—that made complete sense.

Hank sat up and imagined himself dead on the blonde wood floor. He let out a big laugh.
Death is just that,
he thought.
A punch line.

What's the joke?
he imagined someone might ask.

Your life is the joke.

Then he remembered something—a poem. He thought of the poem a lot—more than he thought of the woman who had written it, a woman he had dated in his twenties. The poem was called “Beautiful Things the Poor Can Have” and at first it made him squirm when she read it from her notebook. But by the end of it he had restrained a sob.

The poem was very literal minded—much like the poet herself. It contained a sort of grocery list of things the poor could have—beautiful things. He still remembered parts of it.

The poor can put their shoes on.

The poor can go for a walk.

The poor can say look at the moon it looks like my

mother. Everyone will laugh.

The poor can smoke a cigarette.

The poor can have a good idea that grows in the dark.

The poor can tell a lie and say sorry, that was a lie.

The poor can get in bed and have a dream.

The poor can wake up with a headache.

The poor can shuffle to the kitchen for water and see

their dog and feel okay.

The poor can sit in a chair—their favorite chair.

The poor can look at their own hand and feel

beautiful.

The poor can have a baby and often they do.

The poor can say look at my baby. Isn't my baby

beautiful?

They can hold their baby high

show all their teeth

and know God.

Hank remembered the soft look of pride on the poet's face when she stopped reading.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“Very much,” he said.

“But do you
get
it?” she asked.

“I think so,” he said and smiled. “Tell me anyway. Tell me what it means.”

“It means the poor can have it all,” she said. “And
do
.” Then she kissed him.

The poet had been very poor and at that time he had been poor too. They had been poor together in a tiny apartment in Chinatown and the sex was spectacular.

Now that he was married to a wealthy woman, he wondered what that made him. Not rich exactly—but certainly not poor either. It was a little like being nobody, he thought.
Like a little vase all naked on a shelf.

Mentally he began a list of all the things the rich could have.

Really nice doorknobs.

Rooms they don't even use.

Big closets with wooden hangers.

Duvets with duvet covers.

Weird lighting fixtures—modern sorts of chandeliers.

Fresh flowers.

Copper cooking pots.

Business associates.

Health care.

Rules about how to behave.

Privacy.

Things that are white but not dirty.

 • • • 

Hank thought of reaching for a pen but instead grabbed his phone and called Lenora.

“Hey,” she said after the third ring, her voice a tad something.

He hesitated. “Are you smoking?”

“That's the least of my problems right now, believe me.”

He went mute. She had taken such pains to quit.

“I can't explain it,” she said quickly. “I bought a pack when I got off the plane. It just seemed right.” She exhaled. “The blankets are so bad here. I keep adding another one. They're not that thin but seem to be made of air.”

“I can't believe you're smoking.”

“I don't want to be lectured,” she said evenly.

“Fine.” He took a gruff pause. “How's your mother?”

“You know, the same. Sweet and demonic. Like Satan pretending to be a baby.”

Hank laughed. “I love you, you know that.”

“I do.”

“I know I've been saying that a lot. I hope you know I mean something a little different each time.”

“I know.”

Hank paused. “I don't want it to become meaningless.”

“It won't.” Lenora exhaled. “Mom gave me a picture,” she said, “of me as a baby. She wants me to give it to you.”

“That's sweet.”

“I don't think so,” Lenora sniffed. “She kept saying how much she loved it when I was a baby and suddenly I realized why. I thought oh, you didn't want to
meet
me.”

“Can she hear you right now?”

“I don't care. She's hardly spoken to me. I went out for hours, she didn't even notice.”

“Where did you go?”

“Walmart. I just walked around so long that I started thinking what a great deal.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. Arlington's a toilet. Always has been.”

“Honey, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I'm not depressed. I'm actually kind of inspired. It's not that I want to be a better person.” She paused. “I just don't want to be like my mother.”

He laughed.

“I know she's losing her shit—I mean I get that. But she was always a jerk so there's nothing really to
grieve
.”

“What time are you bringing her to the place tomorrow?”

“It's called Fern Valley.”

“Sounds like a cemetery.”

“Well,”
she said smokily, a smile in her voice.

He pictured her staring out a window, which was exactly what she was doing.

“And now all this stuff I wasn't allowed to
touch
as a kid is being thrown out,” she said. “It's all over the lawn. People have been taking things.”

“Don't you want any of that stuff?”

“No.”

“I miss you,” he said, then regretted it.

“I'll be back tomorrow.”

“Do you miss me?”

“I've been gone for less than a day. So no.”