The Lonely (12 page)

Footage

I used to be very mad at The Parents for never taking any home videos of me. There are a few pictures, but not many, and certainly none of all of us together. I wasn't mad because I particularly wanted to look at them or have them to show to my own kids or anything; I was mad because I took it as a sign that I would probably never be famous. Famous people always seem more worthy of documentation, even when they're little and packing wet sand into buckets at the beach, or in the high school band, hidden beneath a layer of greasy hormones. People around want to trap that specialness in a picture like a firefly cupped between two excited hands, peeking at it through the cracks in their fingers as the light begins to weaken.

And when the news wants to do a story on the girl who bled to death under a rock in the local woods, they won't have any good footage or pictures to use for the segment. This made me mad. They'll probably have to put my goddamn yearbook picture up there, full-faced too-freckly Richard Nixon, appearing in a little box to the left of the newscaster's head. People will squint and wonder if it's a boy.

I began to seethe at the thought of it.

Until I remembered that everyone who dies young is remembered as beautiful and I'll be more popular as a corpse than I ever was alive. All of this blood spilled out over The Woods will soak everyone's memory, absorbed like a cotton ball until thoughts of me can only be recognized by my death. I won't be that weirdo who used to sit behind you in math. I'll be that lovely girl who died in The Woods with all of those wonderful troubles. And Lev will never get the chance to find out how truly un-wonderful I am.

The ground grew warm around me as the sun rose over the rock, for a split second a searing white thumbnail, brightness too much to bear. I squeezed my eyes shut. And they had to stay that way for a while. The ground simmered, leaves and twigs and pebbles as alive as droplets on a hot pan. Little bugs burrowing to the top, fat bees pollinating low flowers, all heavy and drunk with fertility. My bare skin roasting. The Mother would hate to see all of this sun on my face. Wrinkles and freckles seemed to terrify her in a way that drug addiction and teen pregnancy terrified other mothers. She had no reason to worry in that department, and she knew it. No one at school would have ever offered me drugs or sex.

I felt nervous with my eyes closed beneath the rock. Nervous that the scribble of invisible things surely collecting in the odor of my rotting legs would start to lay eggs in and around them before I was all the way dead. The air surrounding me was all excited and foaming with the microscopic matter that thrived on that sort of thing, a signal for bigger critters and feeders and parasites, nighttime creatures who had probably already smelled a bleeding body in The Woods, had already been watching anxiously from their shadowy hiding spots. With my eyes closed, they could begin to fantasize about the ways in which they would devour me when the sun finally went under. Rubbing their claws together hungrily,
slouching slightly closer
. Perhaps they're what scared the squirrel. Perhaps they're only waiting until dark to start feasting.

And the whole woods transformed behind my closed eyelids. The trees were stretching their limbs, arching their trunks, cracking their twigs, preparing for another length of stillness. The Woods filled with the sound and smell of their resounding exhalation, their warm, musky tree-breath invading my lungs: bronchiole branches, alveoli buds.

I heard a rustling of leaves behind me, somewhere behind the creek, the sound of feet sloughing off a layer of forest floor. A careless pair of feet from the sounds of it. Phyllis the Fucking Bitch always insisted that we raise our feet when we walked, so Julia and I had a good ear for shuffling.

With my eyes closed I heard the feet shuffle and shuffle, growing louder and louder until they suddenly stopped, as though they had caught a whiff of being heard. And their nervous stillness was even louder than their shuffling. My heart began to pound. I wanted desperately to open my eyes but it was still too bright to bear; my sockets were becoming little ovens, eyeballs broiling. I heard the sound of sniffing; erratic sniffing, the way that dogs do it.

I think even the trees stopped breathing.

What could this shuffling something be? Is it something coming to save me? Or something coming to finish me off? Or maybe I'm already dead, eyes as still as marbles on a carpet, and the something shuffling, The Something Coming, is a big dirty vulture coming to pierce my bloated belly with its beak, squawking the dinner bell to everything else in The Woods. I hope The Something Coming doesn't turn out to be me, walking along a path like I was this morning and somehow this whole thing turns into a story about time travel. That probably won't happen. I've never really understood time travel anyway. Not even when there are ridiculous instruments like flux capacitors involved to bridge the gaps between science and magic.

Maybe The Something Coming is a hooded, gliding ghoul with a scythe and a skeletal claw hanging out the front of his robe. He's the bouncer of this universe, coming to kick me out for breaking one of the rules: “Do Not Get Crushed by Rock” or maybe “Do Not Bleed to Death.” People have been kicked out for less.

This could be my eternity: to lie beneath this rock and wait until another girl makes her way down here, so I can plant something shiny like Elizabeth's bridle somewhere deep in The Woods to lure her over to be crushed. Maybe these whole woods are haunted with crushed girl ghosts and that's what I'm hearing. They're coming to check me out, make sure I'm cool. Which I'm not, so they'll be disappointed.

Perhaps this is how I'm being punished for wandering. Girls can be lost, but they can never purposely wander, and I knew that, learned it from years of caution embedded in everything I saw and read, but I did it anyway. When boys wander alone they grow into men; they learn things about themselves, discover that they're strong and independent. When girls wander alone they're lured by witches to eat poison apples or get caught and ravaged by bandits.

Maybe The Something Coming is Lev, having sensed somehow that his gal was in trouble. He's hunting for me, ready to be my hero, sun and sky and wind ravaging his thin skin as he comes to save me.

And as the gusts of wind wheezed to a halt, the sun comfortable in the sky above me, a simmering afternoon took hold of The Woods. And the world felt small around me. I pumped blood at its center. I am the only
I.
Everything is Easter.

Early Our Town

One night after Mr. Ungula had already left, the front door opened. It was Lev. Long-necked Lev. His ears looked bigger. And red. It must be cold outside. His feet beneath his cuffed jeans reminded me of shoes peeking from behind a curtain, someone hiding. I imagined him hiding in our bedroom all those years, watching Julia and me do the things we did in there. Seeing me like that and still thinking I was wonderful. Watching. The still, smiling face of a friendly reptile.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello.”

“How's your night?”

“I'm okay.”

“Where's your boss?”

“He's out for the night.”

“On a date?”

“Probably not.”

And he squeezed the fingers of one hand with the other, grouping them tightly together like the stems of a bouquet. He seemed nervous, which made me nervous, so I felt it was best to fill the air with questions.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Down the street from here.”

“What street?”

“Princess.”

“That's not down the street.”

And the long-necked Lev laughed and the inside of his mouth was the soft pink of a lizard's.

“I know. I guess I didn't want you to know how far I walk to get here.”

“Do you live with both your parents?” I asked.

He nodded. “My dad sells insurance and my mom works at the car dealership. And I go to school.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

“Not really.” He looked down at his feet before he said the next thing: “Can you take me through this place?”

“For free?”

“Yeah, sure. You said your boss isn't around.”

“Okay.”

In the first room, Early Our Town, I flicked on the light and it shorted. Well, not exactly a short. Sometimes the lights just needed a minute to warm up. Luckily Mr. Ungula kept a flashlight at reception. I used it to illuminate my favorite bits and pieces of the model for Lev. The layers of Early Our Town began with Styrofoam, carefully scalloped to look like cobblestone, topped with a misting of real soot that Mr. Ungula had scraped from his barbeque at home, where I imagined him to cook all kinds of socially unacceptable meats. Maybe that's what always went wrong with his dates. He offered them plates of horsemeat and bulbous grilled Chihuahua eyeballs on kebab sticks.

“Why does it smell like hot dogs in here?”

“Does it?”

I could have just told him that it was the barbeque soot, but I didn't want to make him sick.

“Yeah, it reeks.”

“Sorry, this place is a dump.”

“No, that's okay, I don't really care about the models anyway.”

“Are you sure? There are naked people in Present Day Our Town.”

“Easter, I want to kiss you.”

And from somewhere deep within the Wonderland, I heard the sound of the bell ringing. The bell on my door, memories buried deep within. It filled my ears until I couldn't really hear, so I stammered, “W-what?” and realized that he'd moved closer.

“I want to kiss you.”

And something seemed to take control of my body. And move me closer to the subterranean humanoid, close enough that I could smell the old wet of his skin and see my reflection in his glazed eyes, but not for long because he closed them shut and I closed mine and somehow our lips found each other and his were as damp as I'd imagined them to be, but also very nice in a way, soft and pliant, but maybe I just liked them because my lips had never touched anyone else's before, not because they were the long-necked Lev's lips and were especially gentle and lovely. Then he tried to pry my lips open with his piping hot tongue and I recoiled, scared and unsure of what to do next. I'd wanted to ask Julia to show me how to do it, but she'd ask too many questions. She'd make me do something bad so the long-necked Lev would stop thinking I was wonderful. She'd accuse me of things that weren't true, or maybe they were and I just didn't want to hear them.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes, I'm okay, I'm just, I have a cold. I'm sick. And I don't want you to get sick.”

“That's okay.”

“No, really, you're so, delicate and I'm worried that you could catch things from me.”

“Delicate?”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn't say I was delicate.”

“Well, you're wonderful too, then, and I don't want you to get sick.”

He was confused and I couldn't blame him and my heart was beating wildly, off its regular rhythm entirely, moving more like a bell in someone else's hands and less like my heart, and I felt scared and confused and guilty and ashamed, so I told him that Mr. Ungula would be back soon so he'd better leave.

“If I give you my address, can you come over later?”

“I don't know.”

“Please?”

“Okay.”

He wrote down his address, handed it to me.

“Go around the back, okay?” he said.

And then he opened the door and left me alone in the dark; the flashlight hanging at my side illuminating my feet, the rest of me enveloped in darkness. I felt something in my mouth, something moving the way that Lev's tongue had moved, but this wasn't warm; it was cold and frantic and I reached in and pulled out one of the little bugs that Lev left always behind, that crawled all over him, that likely filled his underground lair. I flicked it away.

Suddenly I heard a loud thump behind me and threw my spotlight on the model, and there, all lit up like a Broadway star, was a very miniature Julia wearing the once-beautiful rags of an aging lady of the night. She began in a puddle of red in the wet street, scabbed with fruit rinds and trash. The red dripped upward into a dress that cinched in the center and oozed up into Julia's bosom, or bazoom. Mr. Ungula always said that bazooms didn't exist anymore. He liked girls to look like toothpaste tubes squeezed in the middle. And that's what Julia looked like. Cinnamon toothpaste.

“Julia, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Cripes, Easter! Can you get that out of my face please?” Her voice boomed though her stature was small.

I flicked off the flashlight and walked toward the light switch that Mr. Harp had put a star-shaped, glow-in-the-dark sticker on so we could find it in the dark. They seemed to be working now.

“Okay, there. Now what the hell are you doing here?”

“No, what the hell is that guy doing here?”

And she kicked one of the Early Our Town figurines: a drunk man who'd nestled himself into the curb for the night. Mr. Ungula had modeled him after a picture of his sister's husband at their wedding reception. Apparently she'd tripped over him in the dark, otherwise I never would have caught her.

With the light on, Early Our Town looked happier. I could see the smiling faces of chimney sweeps, each with a healthy swiping of soot on their rosy cheeks and a ragged broom denting their shoulders. The street became a market of entrepreneurs with their whole families in tow, learning the trade of selling flowers or eggs in the street as well as cultivating a variety of marketing techniques, such as what the sound of a shrieking child can do for sales or how dressing in rags guarantees higher profits. Men in hats like steam pipes held their noses high, arms hooked with women in warm coats. I had a feeling that Early Our Town looked nothing like this, but I wouldn't dare say that to Mr. Ungula.

“How did you get in there, Julia?” I demanded.

She flung her arms up and screamed a frustrated scream, then turned around and marched into the hotel. The mail slot in the door swung in short, fast bursts after she slammed it, which I'd never seen it do before. Just before it slowed to a complete stop, Julia opened a window in one of the top floor rooms of the hotel and leaned out on her elbows.

“Who's Lev?”

A ball formed in my throat; my heart started flapping again.

“Who?”

“Lev.”

“Oh. Just a customer. Nothing special. I wrote his particulars in the book just like the rest of them.”

There's that goddamn word again. Particulars. I wanted to excise it from my vocabulary with a scalpel, cut all of its roundness out of my mouth.

“Yeah right.”

“Yeah right what?”

“I just saw you kiss him, Easter! I watched you!”

“Goddammit, Julia, why can't you just leave me alone?”

“And you called him wonderful, Easter. You think he's wonderful.”

“I said he was a little bit wonderful.”

“He called you wonderful, too. I told you that you were wonderful. I told you first. Why do you care so much that he says it?”

“I think you're the most wonderful person in the world, Julia.”

“Well you sure don't act like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want me gone for good. You want to marry a boy and live in a house like ours and be just like The Mother. Fine.”

And with that she slipped quickly back through the window, slamming it shut behind her.

“Julia! What are you gonna do?”

But there was no answer.

She wouldn't be back tonight. She'd gone away somewhere I could never know. I locked up and left.

About halfway into heading home I changed my mind and decided to go to Lev's house. I didn't really want to at first. I wanted to just go home, bury my face in my pillow, wait for Julia to creep in next to me, apologize over and over again. But another part of me wanted to taste his lizard mouth again, to have the bells fill my ears and fill my head and fill me up the way that I knew he was supposed to, the way that Amelia's boyfriend did. The way that god, so long ago, had filled me with life and then delivered me to The Mother in peach skin.

I walked all the way to Princess Street and knocked on the back door. After a minute he opened it, smiling wide. We went through his kitchen and into the basement, which was his room. It was cold down there, and damp, and smelled of wet wood and laundry soap. The carpeted floor looked like the multi-colored pebbles of a fish tank, moving somewhat with scribbles of bugs here and there. I sat on the long-necked Lev's bed and he sat next to me, my ears still full of the sound of the bell, so much so that it felt like it was spilling out in the form of hot liquid.

The long-necked Lev sat next to me. He flicked the television on to a quiet, snowy channel so we'd have some light, but not too much. I wished I had my bandana. I wished I could put it over my face.

He told me that he was sixteen. I nodded and said, “That's all right,” though I don't really know what that meant. He said, “How come I've never seen you before now?” and I said, “I don't know,” and trapped my hands between my thighs, glad that it was so dark down here, underground.

I didn't know exactly what to do next. Amelia had demonstrated through her boyfriend's car window the mating habits of primordial dwarves like her, but not of regular people like me.

And suddenly I felt scared and longed so badly to be in Julia's arms, to tell her all about tonight, to tell her I only wanted her. But the long-necked Lev had already put my hands in his and was saying something too quietly to be heard over the bell. And before I knew it I was lying down beneath his cold blanket that smelled hairy and dry. And I finally tasted his honeydrop ears, which actually tasted more like raw potato. And he kept kissing me, moving that hot heavy tongue around, not unpleasantly, but I would rather have been lying next to Julia, watching car headlights from outside move through branches and over her sleeping cheek.

We didn't make it through all of the things Amelia had done, and I was happy about that. Later he walked me outside to my bike and when I finally got home there was no Julia in bed for me to whisper my secrets to even though she would probably have plugged her ears and told me she didn't want to hear it anyway.