Killing Time in Crystal City (14 page)

“Magnanimous of you,” I say, pulling on a pair of shorts and heading to the bathroom on a completely unrelated mission. She returns to poetry.

The shorts have been employed for under a minute before they are dropped again and I am in the shower. I feel a little funky physically from the night I had under the rain and toxins. So I leave the water a bit cool and it feels like a dream washing over me.

It was not a dream, though. I had the light on.

•   •   •

It feels like yet another dream, but I think I can hear Stacey reciting out loud as she reads.

Something about me, moving her like that? Some kind of sorcery. The me in that book is a special guy. I'd like to know that me, again.

He wrote about little me. About him with me. About us, my me and his me, the together me's.

Would he write about this version? This, now? Would anybody?

Those are no reasons to write a poem about me.

Stacey is a reason to write a poem about me. The one reason that could make me poem-worthy, and he doesn't even know she exists so that's that then.

I shut off the water, listen for the voice reciting, but it isn't. I towel off and put shorts on as quickly as possible because I have that flesh-eating anxiety that Stacey is going to disappear or that she never was here at all, light or no light.

I'm not far off.

“What are you doing?” I say as she hands me the bathrobe. I have folded her pants and shirt neatly and was hoping to make a goofy little presentation of them. In my wildest hope I even thought I might wash them. Maybe wash our clothes together, while we ate and watched a movie or something.

“Sorry,” I say as she takes first the pants then the shirt off my hands and dresses right outside the bathroom. “I didn't get the chance for the wash-dry-fold service, so I jumped straight to the end.”

“Oh God,” she says. “You jumped to
the end
? You mean the end-end? Did you get ick all over my things? Should I walk myself through a car wash on the way home?”

She pokes me in the ribs and I double over with the blow of it. Not the rib-poke.

“Not exactly one we're going to be sharing with the grandkids, eh, Stacey?”

I straighten back up, disappointed and concerned over her lack of any retort.

“I'm leaving,” she says with a straight face that I wish would bend one way or another.

“You're leaving?” I ask, still too surprised by this kind of thing than I should be.

“Yes, dodo. I'm leaving. Everybody leaves a place like this before too long. And anyway, I always leave. This is already too much time for me here. I leave. Then I move on. And then I leave.”

I thought it sounded bad when she first said the word “leaving.” But it's rapidly taking on weight and power, like an avalanche.

“Let me make you something to eat first. Then we can both leave together.”

“I mean, leaving Crystal City, Kiki. I mean, really leaving.”

This, now, is a five-alarm panic far worse than last night's paranoia or the worry that Syd might have been here.

“But, Stacey? What about us, and last night, and what happened and us and that stuff we did and all that. And us?”

“Wow. Are you sure there is poetry in your bloodline?”

“Aw come on, Stace. This means . . . I think you can tell this means a lot to me.”

She reaches out and holds my face in her hand. “Of course I can tell. That's why I did it.”

“Good. Great. Do it again, then. How 'bout now? Now's good for me.”

She pulls her hand back and holds up one finger.

“One,” I say. “One. One?”

“Yeah, that was it. It was lovely, but that was it.”

“What? What? Why?”

“Okay, listen, if I told you in advance that I was doing you a favor because of your neediness, I don't think that would have done much for your confidence. What would you have said if I told you I was just offering you a pity bonk?”

I really don't know people at all. I would have thought the answer was already written all over me.

“What would I have said? I would have said thank you. I would have said God bless you. I would have said, sure pity me. Pity me until I cry. In fact, I'd say even if I do cry just ignore it and carry on with the pitying, regardless.”

She looks at me with an expression that is undeniably pity and I don't know how I could have missed it before. Well, yes, I do know.

She gives me a big warm hug and I hang on to her as firmly as I can. “You are a very funny guy.”

“Really? Did you think I was joking?”

“I think I might actually miss you. And I never miss anybody when I leave.”

“So then don't. Stay here and have me all the time.”

She shakes her head. We both knew that one would be a head-shaker.

“Then, take me with you.”

Shake shake shake.

I feel as if I am hurtling through all the life experiences I had missed before now. Achievement and satisfaction and love and loss and resignation are all bunched up together and blurry as they whip by. Time itself, I believe, goes faster in Crystal City than it does elsewhere.

“When do you leave?” I ask her, really wanting to figure this out. “How do you know, if you just want to keep moving from place to place to place and so on, when it's time for you to go?”

Stacey stares at me in a very hard way, like she is trying to drill thought directly from her brain into mine because words always fall a little bit short. The intensity is considerable, and it feels like this is the time to look away. But I figure this is the time to hang in.

“I leave,” she says in an almost angry voice but a totally honest one, “when I feel like I have saved somebody.”

I stare for a good long time, trying to discern any kind of joke. Because I could not have conceived of anybody I have ever met saying this as anything but a joke. But again, I never before met anybody who would have even bothered saving anybody else, so what would I know?

I am this close,
this close,
to taunting Stacey with a question about how many people she has saved, and what, technically, constitutes a save. It seems like a good laugh for a millisecond, before I realize it would have put me this close,
this
close
, to grievous bodily harm.

“Is that possible?” I ask.

“I believe it is, at least in small ways. Other people, you can save them a little, and that's something like a sense of purpose. There's the
possibility
of success in that. I believe there is. I
decided
there is.”

“Well, Stacey, that sounds like a fine . . . wait a minute. Me? Is it me? You can move on now because you saved
me
? I am responsible for throttling my own heart?”

She giggles, and it's a damn refreshing sound but I don't have time for that right now.

“Stacey?”

“Well, come on, Kiki, I did save you from the horrors of that virginity of yours.”

Oh. What? Wait. Oh, now.

I want to talk to Stacey about the thing I have most not wanted to talk to anyone about, ever. Why do I want to do that? Not because I think there is something in it for me, because this feeling was already bubbling up, making me want to even
search
for things that I never talked about, so I could talk about them now, with her. What is that? It's powerful, scary, way stronger than me. What is it? Why?

“Well then,” I say, cartoon cool, “you can just stick around because you haven't saved anybody.”

“No?” she says.

“No. You were not my first.”

Her eyes go as big as Molly's. “I wasn't? Wow, I like to think I'm not easily fooled, but you got me there, big time.”

“Hey,” I snap, making her laugh on top of everything else. “Well then, wisegal, you'd better just brace yourself again. Because I'm pretty sure I slept with a guy.”

What I am prepared for now is possibly more joke cracking, possibly a pat on the back, but certainly something demonstrative.

What I get is not at all that.

True enough, the wide wonder of the eyes I'm looking at would make Molly's look like pinholes by comparison. But the words that follow the extended pause bring another twist.

“The single most unexpectedly interesting thing you have had to say since I met you, and you hold it back until now?”

I nod and smile until it all comes together.

“Are you saying everything else was . . .
uninteresting
?”

She reaches and tugs my arm like she's ringing a church bell. “Oh, get over yourself. That's all in the past. You got coffee? Because now I want details, especially about that ‘I'm pretty sure' part.”

A person of real substance might feel damn cheap here, about trading on his tangled and troubled recent past like this. But you know, too bad, person of real substance.

“There is definitely coffee,” I say, punchy, like I've already had nine cups of it. “Great coffee. Everything around here is always the best stuff. Probably bagels, too, who knows, let's check the freezer.”

There is a light rapid-fire knocking at the front door and I get a jolt.

“More company?” Stacey says. “See, you'll be just fine without me.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” I say, chasing after her.

“Answering the door.”

“No, if it's my uncle, he'll string me up for having you here.”

“I haven't met your uncle, but I'm betting he doesn't knock on his own door before coming inside.”

“But wait,” I say, too late.

Stacey opens the door wide to greet our company.

“Shit, Molly.” Stacey gasps.

She gasps because it is, really, a shit Molly.

She stands there looking tiny, dirty, and electric in the eyes. From four feet away I can smell that awful cast, and now I'm wondering if there's some kind of infection or something under there. But none of that is the true shit Molly part. The right side of her face is battered, swollen, and discolored to the point where that side of her head looks like a very low-grade roast beef.

“I see our Billy is a fucking lefty,” Stacey says icily.

When Molly speaks, it comes out sounding demented and would even if the words were rational. Which they are not.

“I have never been so happy in my whole life, Stacey, so be happy for me. You're happy for me, right, Kiki? And I just came over to borrow your book. I swear I will bring it back unharmed. It's that it is
such
a beautiful book and I just know Billy is gonna love it every bit as much and he's real poetic and beautiful inside and he loves me and I'm good for him. And one of the good things I'm doing is getting these poems and reading them to him. I'll bring it back unharmed, though.”

“Where is he?” Stacey says just as icily and as if she hadn't said it already.

“Please be happy for me, Stacey. He is a good man and I am good for him and we need each other and I have never been so happy in my whole life and that's the truth.”

“Ah, Molly,” I say, shaken up by her condition more than she seems to be.

“I said I would bring the book back unharmed, Kiki. Did you hear me when I said that? And I know Billy will get a whole lot out of it and it'll be good for him just like I am.”

“This is why you didn't answer when I called you, yes?”

“I didn't know you called me,” Molly says.

“Bullshit.”

“I didn't, I didn't but that doesn't matter, because I am really happy now, happier than I have ever been and I just want you to be happy for me, Stacey, and I just want you to lend me that book, Kiki, which I will bring back unharmed and so if you just let me have that now I will be out of your way and you can get back to what you're doing. What are you doing, anyway? Doesn't matter. Never mind.”

I see a decrepit brown people-carrier crawl up to the curb. The large bald head that swivels in our direction just has to be the Billy of infamy.

The low growl coming up from the depths of Stacey tells me she has seen him too. Molly whips around streetside and gives him a quick wave, which he does not return. Then she's back to us.

“Please hurry,” she says even more desperately. “I told him I'd just be a couple of minutes and that by the time he went around the block I would be out again, and so, I'd really just like the book now, please, and we won't bother you again. Except of course to return the book. Which I promise I will do—”

“Yeah, unharmed,” I say, and turn to go fetch the book.

Billy boy revs the engine a few times jackass-style, and it's almost as if the accelerator works on Molly as well. She rises up on her toes and says a much higher “Please?” as he guns it.

“You can't have it,” Stacey says.

“What?” Molly practically cries it.

“Well, it's not actually published for another couple of months. But we'll be happy to put you on the notification list for when it becomes available.”

“What? But he
has
it. I saw it. I read it myself and cried.”

“But I borrowed that copy, and it's the only one. Sorry, girl.”

“So, you lend it to me, then.”

“Well, then I lent it to someone else, and jeez, you know how it is when you lend a book. Stupidest thing in the world you could ever do.”

I love what Stacey is up to while at the same time hating the sight of what it's doing to Molly. The poor thing looks like she's going to dissolve bit by bit until she gets fully absorbed by the welcome mat.

Billy guns the engine. Which touches Stacey's tolerance limit.

“Hey, you!” she shouts, brushing Molly aside to do it. “Screw! How 'bout you just take off before my boyfriend here comes down there and kicks your ass.”

Oh, dear God.

The visions that explode in my mind now involve me kicking nobody's ass, but Billy dragging me behind his van for a few hundred miles, then dumping me back in front of the house where my uncle has returned to find his careful quietude destroyed, which requires that he stomp me right there in front of the house and the girls and everything.