Good Indian Girls: Stories (6 page)

Two photographs were pinned to the familiar faded pink fabric covering of her cubicle wall. In one, her mother stood in front of a life-size plaster statue of a giraffe with the paint peeling. In the other, her father supported a slice of cake and stared with sour embarrassment at the camera. Neither of her parents could remember where or when each was taken, and this small mystery had always excited Lovedeep. Not everything was known, things remained to be discovered, the universe still guarded secrets. Indeed, there were times she looked down at the piles of papers scattered across her desk: receipts, invoices, queries, letters, memos, printed out emails, threats for legal action, etc., and could not comprehend what they were. Even paper lost the quality of its paperness. At such moments, the world glowed with a tangible strangeness and danger. Anything might happen. She might fall madly in love. She might be brutally murdered. Both prospects thrilled her equally.

Marjorie tapped the divider and a moment later, her head appeared. “Well?”

Lovedeep, her face upturned, stared wide-eyed. Since returning from the smoking break, the universe had lost its edge of unknowing. The photographs were mysteries only because her parents lacked the interest to trace the memories. The papers spread out in piles impinging on her keyboard were dull and self-explanatory. The color of the fabric of her cubicle walls represented nothing more than a measurable wavelength of light. The world was what it was and nothing more and would forever remain exactly this.

Marjorie wanted to know if Lovedeep was going to ask her to happy hour that night, because if Lovedeep wasn’t, she’d have to come up with another plan, and quickly, as it was already late in the afternoon. Yes, Lovedeep had wanted to ask earlier, something had stopped her talking. Didn’t Marjorie notice her friend standing there, nearly choking, trying to get the words out?

Marjorie winced. Was that what that was?

The flat screen television behind the bar was tuned to a news channel and on her third margarita, Lovedeep looked up to be confronted by a video close-up of a dead woman’s face. The woman had been strangled.

“Another one?” Marjorie said.

“Is that number two or three?”

“Number three.”

The killer was known as the Internet Strangler because after each murder he released a video-nasty onto the internet of the dead woman’s face. Nothing else, just a close-up running for as long as five minutes. The report excerpted a few seconds from the whole video and the stricken face of
the newscaster returned. The music was loud in the bar and the television sound was switched off. The running subtitles for the deaf were largely incomprehensible due to the high number of spelling errors and typos. A composite sketch appeared, showing a round, balding head and a man with sleepy, humorless eyes.

Lovedeep decided he looked cute.

On her fourth drink and third free personal pizza, Marjorie confessed that last week she had lied when she said she had a date. She had wanted to do something different, by herself, maybe go to a different bar, maybe get picked up by a stranger, get fucked in the bathroom, that kind of thing. She didn’t. She went home and watched television and, in the middle of the night, woke up in a fright, walked into the living room naked, switched on all the lights and opened the curtains, and took hold of her one potted plant and threw it out the window. It landed and shattered on a car’s hood with a thundering crash. In seconds, an alarm started blasting.

“What happened?” Lovedeep was mesmerized.

Nothing happened, Marjorie said. After five minutes, the alarm went silent and in the morning, she woke, naked and sprawled in the living room as if the victim of a rape. She passed the car as she left for work. The remnants of the potted plant were still there and a dent bruised the hood. On her return in the evening, the car had vanished, and so had any sign of the plant.

Marjorie lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Lovedeep’s face. Then she pulled back and grinned, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” though it was unclear exactly what Marjorie was apologizing for. A lingering sense of discomfort followed Lovedeep to the women’s room. It was here she first spotted
the flyer taped to the wall, next to the mirror. “CLOSET FULL? LIFE EMPTY?” the bold letters stated. “Change your life. Throw out the old you. Start from scratch. Get moving today on the path to a clutter-free future.” She tore off one of the tabs with the phone number for information; then suddenly, as if possessed, ripped the flyer from the tiles and walked out. She slapped it onto the counter in front of Marjorie. “I’m going to this next week,” she said. “Do you want to come?” Marjorie’s head was down, her fingers curled around the stem of a margarita glass. A minute passed before Lovedeep realized her friend was asleep.

The only reason Lovedeep returned for the second week of the de-cluttering class was in the hope of seeing Ian again. The same short-haired instructor sat cross-legged on the metal desk at the front of the room and started proceedings with a breathing and affirmation exercise. “Imagine you are sitting in a garden surrounded by empty shelves,” she said softly. “You hear a waterfall and see a closet with absolutely nothing in it. You are the closet. Say it to yourself, with each inward breath. Say, I am the empty closet waiting for life to fill me up.” Lovedeep kept her eyes wide open and remained furious while around her women mostly expanded their chests and breathed out noisily through their mouths.

Ian was nowhere, and she felt humiliated and cheated.

During the break, she confronted the instructor. Did she remember the man with the round head from last week, so tall, a little pudgy, with sleepy eyes? Yes, the instructor said, he was a weird one. She was glad he didn’t come back. “Bad vibes. Ugly, even. I’d stay clear if I was you.” Lovedeep decided the instructor was jealous. She plucked up her courage. “Do you have his number?” she asked. The
instructor took a moment to consider her response, took hold of Lovedeep’s wrist and brought her mouth close to Lovedeep’s ear.

“We’re after bigger things, aren’t we, you and I,” she whispered. Lovedeep didn’t know what she was talking about. The instructor continued, “We want to overturn our lives. Start from scratch, tear open our bodies.” The instructor’s breath beat warmly against Lovedeep’s ear. “Listen to me, I know what you need. Come with me to India. Take me there. Please.”

The instructor’s nails pressed into the flesh of Lovedeep’s wrist. “We can do it together, we can walk from the bottom of India all the way to the top.”

Saying that, her nails pressed so hard that Lovedeep let out a cry and wildly yanked her arm free. She turned furiously and started racing past the stunned eyes of her fellow students.

Behind her, the instructor called out her name.

Lovedeep slammed open the door and threw herself into the crowd of milling smokers and out into the parking lot with its warm air smelling of car exhaust. Once inside her own car, she burst into tears. The instructor was right. She wanted more than anything to overturn her life, to start anew, to become someone else entirely. She turned on the engine and drove away, thinking that she was nothing more than a coward.

A message was waiting on the answering machine. It was from Ian. On hearing it, all the agitation of the evening disappeared instantly.

He was sorry for not calling earlier. He’d planned to see her again at class tonight, but got delayed. Traffic. He was in the area. If she was up, could he come over? He wanted
so much to see her. There was something he wanted to tell her, and he could only say it to her face.

The first thing he did on entering was to walk into her bedroom and open the closet doors. He was carrying a backpack and a small, black leather case that looked like a camera bag.

“It’s not so bad,” he said, indicating the closet. “You don’t need that class.” He held up a wide leather belt and admired it. “I like this. You should wear it.” He handed it to Lovedeep.

She had watched him walk from the door, across the living room and into her bedroom, with disbelief and a rising sense of admiration. She liked how he moved, he was familiar, it was as if he lived here already. Everything that had happened to her that day, these last few weeks, maybe even everything that had ever happened to her, had been erased when she heard his message. She was a different person already. Tomorrow, she would tell Marjorie this. “I’m not your friend anymore,” she would say, “I don’t know why I ever was. Go find someone else.”

“The woman at the class told me you give off bad vibes,” she said to Ian. “She said you’re ugly. In spirit or something, I don’t know.” She slipped the belt around her waist and pulled it tight.

“Tighter.” He pulled it tight for her. “Like that.”

With the belt so tight, Lovedeep had trouble breathing.

“You’re going fast,” she said. “Let’s have a beer. You did bring some.”

He pulled a six-pack out of the backpack. Coors. She hated Coors.

“My favorite,” she said, opening a can and following him back into the living room. A heavy glass ashtray sat on the
coffee table, overflowing with butts. She lit a cigarette and offered it to him. He took it wordlessly.

The apartment was sparsely furnished. A sofa, loveseat, glass-topped coffee table, television. When a friend came over, they sat together, smoking, discussing what to order for takeout or watch on cable. Despite the lack of furniture, her experience of the room was of being suffocated. She could not walk, she told herself, without tripping over all her crap. Was this why she’d jumped at the opportunity when she saw the de-cluttering flyer in the women’s room that night?

“How long have you lived here?” he said.

They were sitting together on the sofa. His hand was shaking again.

It took her a moment to remember. “Two years.”

The room looked shockingly different with Ian in it. Gone was the clutter, the sense of suffocation. How little she really owned! How much space was there! The walls were bare, the shelves empty, yet for two years she had thought it crowded, almost uninhabitable. She owed him a debt for opening her eyes.

“People know you?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“It’s good to be anonymous. Come and go as you want, no one poking their nose in.”

“What’s in the camera bag?”

“A camera.” He laughed.

She finished the beer and opened a second. “There’s that guy going around killing girls and filming it,” she said.

“I know.”

“Have you seen the videos? They show bits on TV. Weird. Just the face.”

He placed a hand on Lovedeep’s wrist and gripped it tightly. It was the same wrist the instructor had dug her nails into, but instead of the need she had felt in the instructor’s touch, all she felt now was relief. He had shown her, just by walking into her apartment, how much space she really lived in.

“I like you,” she said.

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes and talked softly to the ceiling.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“What is?”

“The face after death,” he said.

He spoke as if in a dream, and she wondered if the dream she’d had the night she met him was somehow connected to this moment, that perhaps he was the essence of that very dream made solid.

“Just lying there,” he continued, “thinking nothing at all. You can think a lot of odd things staring at a dead girl’s face. It makes the mind wander, clears the head of all that other bullshit, makes a man capable of seeing for miles ahead. A man could see straight to Arizona from here. You’d think it’d be nasty, but no. They’re relaxed, they know the answers now, they’ve gone across, they’ve faced the last battle, and they’ve taken a little bit of you with them. That takes courage.”

He paused and tightened his grip on Lovedeep’s wrist. “Do you have courage?” he asked.

Nothing happened for a long time after that.

Ian opened a second can for himself. Lovedeep watched as he took a drink. Time had begun to move in such extraordinary slow motion that she was sure, at first, that the can would never reach his lips; and when it did, that it would
never leave them. It did that too. The moment released a flood of thoughts. They all tumbled on top of her at once, as though a bookshelf had been pushed over and crashed down on her, with all its ideas and people and stories intact. He was the killer. She laughed inwardly. He was going to kill her. Was he? Yes, of course he was. That’s what killers do. They kill people. She laughed inwardly at that too. Killers kill people. It was so true it was absurd. But here he was, waiting to kill. Nothing like this had ever happened to Lovedeep before. She had to laugh at that too. Of course it hadn’t. If it had, she’d be dead. She thought suddenly of her mother, sitting at home. She would be watching cable at this hour. Her father would be complaining about her mother watching cable. Her mother always watched the same shows, and he always complained. Yet he watched the same shows and others besides. She had said this to him, so had Mom. He never listened. He could watch whatever he wanted, he paid the cable bill.

Ian’s grip tightened and she realized she was crying.

“I won’t scream,” she said suddenly. “I won’t make any noise.”

The words came out of her. She had no idea why, or whether she would scream or not. Ian’s grip relaxed momentarily and she felt the soothing brush of his fingers across her sweat-moistened skin.