Before
Buddha was killed, everything was perfect.
Buddha
worked with me at a clothing store called King’s. She was at my apartment the
first time Collin Fromm asked to see what was underneath my eye patch. Buddha
was gluing false lashes to my right eye when Collin came in looking for his
girlfriend. It was after midnight. Collin was our boss. He wore his usual
serious face with a fat chin, and no matter how hostile he acted, the way his
eyebrows drooped over his eyes made him look puppy-doggish and sad. He seemed
surprised that Buddha was with me.
Buddha also looked startled, rubbing her fingers behind
her back. She was older than me by two years but her round, Chinese face made
her look like a young girl. Her hair was shaved, and as she looked up at Collin
I could see the soft spot on top of her head.
“Did you bring us wine?” I asked.
“I brought this for Taylor,” Collin said, and he cradled
the bottle of wine in his arms like a baby.
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if we had a few sips,” I
said. Collin snorted as I reached over and slipped the bottle from his hands.
Then he followed me to the kitchen as I tried to remember where I had last seen
the corkscrew. I was wearing a new pair of pink stilettos that belonged to
King’s. When I stumbled, Collin was there to catch my elbow. This when he asked
me to take off the patch covering my left eye.
By
the way he asked, I could tell Collin thought I never showed it to anyone, so I
played along and removed it gingerly, as if taking off my panties in front of a
man for the first time. He dropped his large head close to mine for a closer
look. His breath smelled like pastrami and mustard. As he peered inside the eye socket, I had the
image of a goldfish swimming past where my eyeball should be. The thought made
me laugh and I reached up to affix my patch. Collin breathed in sharply and
caught my wrist with his sweaty, fat hand. But I was done playing my games with
Collin for the hour. I slipped free from him and set my sights on opening the
wine. Then, with my back turned to him, Collin offered to pay for my glass eye.
Had the proposal been genuine? I felt my shoulders
involuntarily shift as the idea rolled in my body. But I wasn’t ready to let
Collin know he could give me exactly what I wanted. “For someone who thinks he
has so much money, you could have brought a better bottle of wine,” I said.
I had been living rent-free in
Long Beach, at the Promenade and Broadway, in the old Art Deco building next to
the Blue Café; around the corner was a bookstore that let homeless
people sleep in their parking lot, a sight like hairy potato sacks that always
made me grateful for the small space I could call home. Within walking distance
was the ocean, although it smelled like dead fish and rotting mermaids. My rent
was free because I was living with Taylor Wilson, Collin’s girlfriend, one of
those beauties who snorted coke and Adderal, smoked cigarettes, ate deep fried
foods, and did other kinds of nasty things that would make her ugly when she
was older. I had yet to officially meet Collin’s wife, although she came to the
shop every now and then to speak privately with Collin, looking stoned and
dreamy-eyed with white cat hair stuck to her dress. Talking to Collin’s wife
was against the rules.
Collin
owned King’s, a shop that sold clothing geared towards rock star kids who
wanted leather pants and, more and more these days, ruffled blouses and
mile-high Baroque wigs. It was a small shop but jam packed with racks of
corsets, dresses, tight-fitting jackets, and shiny leisure suits just waiting
to make someone feel a little different, a little less like themselves. The
walls were painted salmon pink and mismatched greens, and everywhere there were
fliers inviting you to the glories of tango dancing or sculptures or
wild-haired guitar players promising a hot, hot night. Collin didn’t play
anything at the store but British punk rock. Raw, aggressive guitar riffs made
the store seem heavy with traffic even when there were only two people there. I
liked that Collin’s musical taste was predictable and constant. You could know
everything about Collin in one day.
For
the most part, Collin didn’t like people, or at least he wasn’t very friendly.
It was as if he was pretending to be Scrooge with a love for the Buzzcocks. He
tolerated women more than men. A boy named Greg with scruffy chin hair and blue
fingernails filled out an application once or twice a month, and it was obvious
that Collin wouldn’t hire him because he was a guy. When I was living in
Phoenix, I had dated Collin’s brother, the Pitt Bull, and met Collin at a
family get-together. He had never been very nice to me, but I knew to look him
up when I needed a place to go. Our relationship went like this: Collin shook
his loose cheeks and snorted in my face and criticized everything about me, and
I flirted with him and worked at his shop, slept in his girlfriend’s apartment,
and collected a paycheck every two weeks. After leaving the Pitt Bull, I had
only planned to stay in Long Beach for a couple months until I figured out what
was happening to my life. Then I surprised myself by loving the work.
The job entailed working the cash register and getting
new inventory ready to be sold. We were given a toy gun that made price tags
and sometimes I put ridiculous prices on some of the cheapest things in the
store, just to see if I could sell them and pocket the difference. Creating
window displays was part of the fun, although I had to fight Taylor to do it. I
would come to work early just so I could dress the mannequins and arrange their
bodies the way I liked. But when Taylor came in, she would complain loudly
until I stripped the mannequins clean. Sometimes I would just leave the
mannequins like that, naked with their featureless faces and crudely formed
private parts. People would stare outside the window at the nude still lifes
until hours later when Taylor finally decided on the clothing she wanted to
display.
Collin
wanted us to advertise by wearing clothes from the shop, and I learned quickly
that we could pilfer anything we wanted. When I went out at night, I wore pink
leather boots, a leopard-print dress, a loud peacock boa, and none of it
mattered because everyone looked at my black eye patch anyhow. Taylor wore all
black with a gold necklace from Collin that cost more than our paychecks
combined. When people looked our way I would shout, “King’s! King’s! Find
everything you need at King’s!” and flutter a kiss at them with my peacock boa.
By the end of the night, I would be drunk and Taylor wouldn’t be talking to me
anymore, and my pink boots would be stained with blue Curacao, but nothing
mattered, especially the boots because they belonged to King’s.
I was making a lot of money for the shop, too. I could
convince even the shyest of girls to buy the red-sequined skirt that showed off
her thighs, and squeezed the boys into pants so tight they needed new shoes to
match.
“Are
you the singer, the bass player, or the drummer?” I’d ask, and tried to act as
if I knew what kind of outfit each kind of rock star needed. The more I did it,
the easier and easier it became to give the kind of bogus opinions that would
make them comfortable enough to buy hot tribal colors an audience would be
whispering about. I would go to a show at the Blue Café and see the drummer
wearing the kind of pinstriped hat I had recommended, and the spotlights
catching the rhinestones on the singer’s thick, chunky belt with the King’s
logo emblazoned on the buckle.
Collin didn’t like to go out. He would come over to the
apartment to see Taylor, and growl at me for wearing the shop’s dresses around
the house. Collin was not one to yell. His brother, the Pit Bull, yelled at me
all around the house, following me into the bathroom when I tried to close the
door his face. The Pitt Bull bit me once too, bit me hard, right on my forearm
that left a large purple bruise. But Collin was at least softer than that. He
had a low voice that always sounded tired as he pinched the edges of his nose
with his chubby first finger and thumb.
“Didn’t
you get us any vodka?” I would ask him, and Collin’s mouth would go slack as he
shook his head.
Sometimes Collin would convince Taylor to stay home, and
I would call on Buddha, whose voice always sounded sleepy and distant over the
phone. Buddha wore apron tops that showed off the mandala tattoo on her back,
and the same cargo pants that Collin despised day after day. She was quiet, but
I found out she was a perfect nighttime comrade if you followed her to the
music clubs that she liked. She knew how to break dance, and a crowd would
circle around her as she twirled her legs in the air and balanced on her head
as she spun on the floor. If Buddha got really drunk, she would continue
dancing in the street after the clubs closed. She liked to climb on top of
cars, and once she fell while doing a handstand with one hand on the roof of a
Honda Civic, rolling onto the hood and laughing when I asked how much it hurt.
Then one night Buddha took me to a club where a
skinny-ribbed woman wearing a silver bikini danced in the window. When we
walked in, the white fur attached to my knee-high boots lit up under the black
light’s rays. Buddha’s friend, Liang, gave us a wide smile from inside his
hoodie and offered us acid. I declined at first, holding up my vodka and
cranberry juice, but Buddha let one dissolve on her tongue, and so I held out
my tongue too. After awhile, caterpillars appeared all over my boots and flung
themselves into the air, turning into electric purple butterflies and landing
spectacularly onto people’s shoulders as they danced. I thought I saw the Pitt
Bull and hid in the bathroom on one of the toilets until a midget with silver
eyeshadow burst into the stall and told me she would pee on me if I didn’t
move. Horns were coming out of Liang’s head by the time we left. Buddha let out
a shout when we walked outside, but she couldn’t tell me what she was seeing as
she wrapped her arms around her head. Then Buddha spread her arms out wide and
ran to climb on top of a beautiful mint green Plymouth Belvedere. She was
wearing Puma sneakers and they were a bright white. When she reached to the
top, two heads popped up from inside the Plymouth. One was a man who started
shouting at us, glaring at me as if I had any control over Buddha as she spun
on top of his car. The woman was also staring at me, clutching a shirt to her
chest. She had plump Puerto Rican lips and thick black hair swirling around her
face. There was gauze taped to her right eye, and the way she was staring at me
suddenly filled me up. The world had a new one-eyed girl. I floated to the
Plymouth as if riding on the back of a turtle, and pressed my face up against
the window. The one-eyed girl screamed, and Buddha slid down the car, landing
on her feet. We ran together down the gritty streets of Long Beach, leaving a
kiss from my lipstick on the glass of the Plymouth.
My
boyfriend lived in New York. His name was Brock, and I was his “One-Eyed Girl.”
Brock was the cello player for Amadeus, one of the many rock bands that were
wearing the white wigs and ruffled shirts. Sometimes Brock wore the wig while
we had sex, which was silly and made him sweat and made me fall in love with
him. It was easy to fall in love with Brock, because he never stayed in
California for too long. He would fly in, do a gig with his band, make love to
me eight or nine times, and cook breakfast before he went away again.
We were sitting down to eat Brock’s banana pancakes and
hash browns. Taylor was still in bed with a hangover, waiting for Brock to
leave so that she could have our leftovers. It was a Tuesday in late September,
and unusually cold for Southern California. I was shivering and wearing a hooded
sweatshirt. Brock’s flight was at 11:15, and I was scheduled to work at the
shop at noon. Brock said, “Take the eye patch off just one more time before I
go.”
“Not at breakfast,” I told him.
“It’ll increase my appetite,” said Brock, nodding quickly
to show he spoke the truth. Brock was skinny with stretched out features. His
fingers were long and pale, and looked like spider legs as he drummed them on
the table. There was black makeup smudged underneath his eyes from the eyeliner
he wore at night.
“Wouldn’t it be more exciting if I ate without any
clothes on?”
“How about you do both,” said Brock. I lifted my eye
patch and he lunged for me, knocking me down so we could have sex on the wooden
kitchen floor.
As I lay on my back, I looked up at Brock as he smiled
into the gaping hole where my left eye should be. When I closed my one good
eye, it was strange feeling the way he was staring into me. I supposed it was
comforting. Other men I slept with had to have the lights off, smelling salty
and ashamed as they stumbled out of their jeans and touched me as if my other
parts would appear missing too. I reached my arms up and held onto Brock’s thin
shoulders, and thought of the girl from the Plymouth with gauze taped to her
eye. I wondered if she really did have a missing eye, or if it had been
repairable. I imagined her boyfriend pleading with her to take off her bandage
before she was ready, if it had hurt her to throw her head back and expose
herself like that for the first time.
“I think I should stay longer,” said Brock, and kissed me
on the collarbone.
“I think we should eat our banana pancakes,” I said.
“You eat,” said Brock. “I want to play you a song.” He
stood up without putting his boxers on. I watched my skinny lover from behind
as he went to fetch his cello, and then I searched the floor for my patch.
I liked Taylor as a roommate because she was so engrossed
with herself, she never paid too close attention to other people. When Collin
announced that I would be sleeping on the couch at her apartment, she did
nothing to help turn the living room into my bedroom, but didn’t protest
either. Brock and I would be making love on the couch when she came home in the
early morning, and she would absent-mindedly stand in the kitchen, talking to
herself while trying to decide what to eat for a snack. Taylor and I went out
together on most nights, because it was better than going alone, and because
she always had a sense of the hottest place to be on most nights. But we didn’t
talk to each other much, because we were both waited for the other to initiate
the conversation. Even when Taylor was offering me drugs, she would make a
gesture to the little bag of white powder instead of using speech.
When Taylor came out of her room, Brock was still naked,
playing the cello while I sat at the table, knees hugged close to my chest,
sucking on my fork. Brock had missed his flight back to Manhattan, and I was at
least thirty minutes late for work. I wasn’t sure how we wasted so much time
doing the same thing for so long, but Taylor didn’t notice that she should have
been alone in the house. She looked rough as she always did the mornings after
she partied too hard, especially when she was making the scene without me to
accompany her. I watched the way her blonde body moved to the sound of the
cello as Brock brought out its deep, bewitching sound. Taylor poured out the
rest of the coffee that I had saved for her and made a fresh pot, as if what I
had made wasn’t good enough. Then she sat down across from me and lit a
cigarette, watching Brock and I with the glazed interest of watching Saturday
morning cartoons.
It was funny—I knew Taylor was staring at my eye patch
just as everyone else did. I looked back at her, at the beauty of how she was
wrecking herself. Her skin was so pale it was almost blue. She sucked on her
cigarette, wetting the tip, and swallowed some of the smoke before exhaling. I
didn’t do enough destruction to have people pay attention to me as they did
with Taylor. I wonder how things would have been different if I hadn’t lost an
eye. I wondered if I would have been noticed at all.
It happened when I was seven. I got caught in the middle
of a neighborhood sword fight. This was between two boys, David and Ryan, and
me, the princess. The boys had sticks, and I was very good at giving dramatic
sighs and waving my hand in front of my forehead in distress. Ryan, the
villain, was determined to win me at all costs. He had his arm wrapped around
my neck, breathing hard in my ear as he waved the stick in his free hand. “Yer
staying with me on the dark side,” Ryan said out of the corner of his mouth,
and then paused before he laughed: “Heh, heh, heh.” More than anything else, I
would remember the laughter of the nefarious Ryan: Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh,
heh.
David,
my failed hero, was older than Ryan and me. He was wearing a white shirt that
day, and so naturally he was picked to be the good guy. Except David wasn’t
playing by the script. Instead of valiantly saving me using skills that proved
all was just in the world, he taunted the efforts of Ryan’s evil-doings. “You
look like you’re ready to give her a kiss,” sneered David. “Your about as evil
as your Mom.” Ryan squeezed tighter on my neck, and threatened loudly to slit
my throat if David didn’t fight like a man. Then he laughed again in my ear: Heh,
heh, heh. This was when I decided I’d had enough. I tried to wriggle free
from Ryan’s body odor, his heavy breathing, his sun-freckled arm. And then I
really was a princess, lying in David’s arms with blood all over his hands. We
never found my left eye. In my dreams, a raccoon ran off with it, and fed it to
his mate.
Collin came looking for me when it was clear I wasn’t
coming in to work. I told him to hold on a second so that Brock could put his
clothes on before I opened the door.
“What are you doing in here?” asked Collin, and turned to
Brock, squinting at him as if to make him disappear. He was wearing a green
silk shirt, and there sweat stains at his armpits and around his flabby
breasts. “Buddha had to stay past her shift.”
I
said, “It’s all Taylor’s fault,” and Taylor looked up and smiled. “I’m glad you
came, Collie,” she said.
“I’m
going to the shop now,” I said.
“I’ll
join you,” said Brock.
“No,”
said Collin. “No, no, no.”
But
Brock and I went together anyway, and he put his hand in my back pocket as we
walked down the street. We turned the corner, and on the sidewalk there was a
group of airplane-sized whiskey bottles that someone had stacked together to
make a castle, with a crushed can of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the top that made for
a flag.
When we got to King’s, I put on a yellow plaid
dress that zipped up in the front. Brock wanted to give a Baroque wig to a
homeless man who had his shoes tied to his belt, but I wouldn’t let him take it
off the shelf.
“Give him something from the clearance
section,” I said.
We
made love in one of the dressing rooms when no one was in the shop, which
sounded romantic but was actually a little uncomfortable because we did it
standing up, and I was worried about getting into trouble. “You really do like
this job,” Brock mused. He lit a cigarette, and I made him go outside.
The
band called Fiends walked in. They recognized Brock from Amadeus and treated
him warmly, although I knew from the way they glanced at me that they were
being nice for my sake, and that if they saw Brock at a bar they would laugh
loudly at his skinny boy ways.
Phil,
the band’s singer said, “We want leisure
suits, like the kind John Travolta wears in Saturday Night Fever. But nothing
too shiny.”
“Where’s
the best place to find some angels?” asked the drummer. He looked at me and
smiled. His teeth were a grungy yellow.
“Not
here,” said Brock, and I appreciated the anger in his voice. “What’s your size,
Man?”
The
Fiends spent hundreds of dollars at the shop, and paid in cash. I gave them
each a body bag and held the door for them on their way out. Carson, the guitar
player, was hiding near the clearance rack. Then he pulled out something I had
never seen before—a top hat with a yellow feather and a black lace veil that
covered his face.
“We
should give that to the homeless man,” I told Brock.
“I’ll
give it to him,” said Carson, and he walked out with it on his head.
“I can’t stand how people act in Long Beach,” Brock
complained.
“They were nice enough,” I said.
Brock
turned and wrapped his arms around my waist, his long fingers looping around
the band of my underpants. He bit my earlobe. “Come to New York with me. Let me
take you out of this place.”
“Could you guarantee I find a job working with rock
stars?” I asked.
“You could open your own shop,” said Brock. “I’d bet
you’d do it better than Old Pigface.”
“And would I be able to live in an apartment without
paying rent?”
“There’s your reason for leaving this place right there,”
said Brock. “You know you can’t be doing that forever.” His hand felt cold on
my skin, and I pulled away from him.
A
week later, Brock left on an airplane headed East, and I went out on a date
with Phil, the singer from Fiends, whose last name was Alexander. I went out with
Phil because Brock had never made it clear that he wanted an exclusive
relationship, and I didn’t want to be unprepared when I found out who he was
entertaining in his lofty apartment on Bleeker Street, with its noisy
bedsprings and black plush pillows. I had only been to his apartment twice, but
it was hard to forget the plush pillows.
Phil
met me at my door with a white rose. “Leave the boa here,” said Phil.
He
took me to an Italian restaurant in Belmont Shores, and I noticed that there
was a white rose on each of the tables. “Don’t you think that’s a little
eerie?”
“You
mean to say that it’s lovely,” said Phil, and he pulled out my chair.
The
waiter came by, and I saw him blink when he saw my eye patch, then look away.
He was a short man with square, manicured hands.
“I’ll
have a glass of Chianti,” I said.
“Better
to wait until we’ve ordered,” said Phil. “You may want a white.”
I
turned to the waiter. “I’ll have a whole bottle of Chianti,” I said. “Please.”
Towards
the end of the night, Phil started to relax. He told me about his first pair of
leather pants, which he wore when he was in a band called Wet Cat. Then he told
me about his pet ferret, Rasputin, and how much the rest of the Fiends hated it
when he brought Rasputin on tour. I laughed, and Phil reached across the table
and took my hand, running his thumb over my knuckles.
He
took me back to his hotel room, and I was surprised that he wasn’t living in
Long Beach. “I live in San Diego,” said Phil. “This city is too much for me.”
We
slipped into the cream-colored hotel sheets, and I cried a little because I
missed Brock, even though Phil was a fine lover. The lights were left on, and
Phil didn’t even seem to notice my unfortunate missing part. I cried because it
felt as I was cheating on Brock, and I cried because I wasn’t sure if I was
supposed to care. I imagined all the pretty girls in New York with their long
eyelashes and wholesome blue eyes, and I wondered how many times Brock had
kissed their eyelids as they made love. When it was over, Phil smirked at me as
he lit a cigarette.
“You
smoke like Taylor does,” I said.
“Is
she the other girl that works at King’s?”
“She’s
dating the boss,” I said.
“She’s
dating a lot of people,” he said. I didn’t want to know what he meant, and so I
rolled out of bed and pretended there was someplace I had to go. As I put my
boots on, I noticed the ferret, hiding behind the armchair. He was white, with
his eyes large and red.
“Take
a cab home,” he reminded me.
“Tell
me when your next gig is,” I said, and missed his mouth when I leaned in to
give a kiss. I tried calling Buddha while I waited for my taxi, but I only got
her voicemail, telling me very shyly that she would call back as soon as she
had the chance.
I came home and found Taylor lying on the floor near my
couch. She had vomited on herself, and there was a little bit of blood
underneath her nose. I screamed and she opened her eyes and said something I
couldn’t understand, then closed her eyes again. She was wearing one of my
favorite zebra-print dresses, but it didn’t much matter because it was King’s.
I screamed again, and dragged her into the shower to wake her up. “I’m fine,
you bitch,” Taylor said, and leaned her head over the bathtub to puke on the
floor. I turned the water faucet knob all the way to cold, just to see if she
would move out of the way. She swore, but stayed where she was. I decided to
call Collin. “Collie,” I breathed into the phone, using Taylor’s nickname to
let him know it was serious.
“Don’t
ever call me when I’m at my wife’s house,” Collin growled at me. By the time he
had come, I had cleaned up the bathroom and Taylor was standing up in the
shower, taking her time to scrub herself clean.
“I
was really scared,” I told him.
“Then
you call 911,” said Collin.
“Don’t
be like that,” I said. “C’mon, you’re here now so you might as well have a
seat. Do you want something to eat?”
He
let out a sigh, flapping his lips, and eased himself onto the corner of the
couch. He put his hands on his head, and pulled his hair. Then he said, “I’m
sitting on your bed.”
“I
know,” I said. I sat down next to him and nudged him softly with my elbow.
“When are you going to get us an apartment with two bedrooms?”
His
shoulders shook and he snorted out a laugh. “I don’t know why I surround myself
with so many women,” he said. “You are all too much.” He spoke in that hoarse
kind of way that people talk in when they’re tired. I looked out the window,
and saw the sky was lightening. In just a short while, the sunrise would come up
with all its glorious rock star colors.
“I
miss Brock,” I said, and put my head on Collin’s wide shoulder.
“I
want to see your eye again,” said Collin.
My
head felt heavy, and I didn’t want to take it away from Collin’s shoulder. It
occurred to me that I didn’t know how old Collin was, although I’m sure the
Pitt Bull must have told me once. I had never thought of Collin as a lustful
man, not really. Perhaps this was because I had needed to rely on someone so
badly, and I didn’t want to feel like a prostitute. I pictured how he saw
Taylor, and what he did to her small body when I was out watching Buddha dance.
I moved away from Collin. I wasn’t drunk off the Chianti anymore, and wished I
had more.
“I
wonder where I would be without you, Collin,” I said.
“You
might be better off,” said Collin. “I’m not really that good at taking care of
anybody else. I try, though.” We were quiet for a moment, listening to the
water run in the bathroom. I stood up to check on Taylor and Collin said in a
loud voice, “Just show me already.”
Why some men felt compelled to see my eye socket I would
never understand. Why some men felt the need to pry open my dark closet until
they come face to face with the simple black hole of where my eye should have
been nestled inside. Collin’s fat fingers advanced towards me, and I felt him
gently lift up my slack eyelid for a better look. I backed away from his touch.
“I don’t want you to worry about this anymore,” he told me. When he offered for the second time to pay
for my artificial eye, a rash of warmth spread throughout my chest. My legs,
freshly shaven, still felt raw from my date with Phil, and I imagined that it
was Collin who had brought me to the hotel room; Collin’s large body over mine
while Taylor lay passed out in our apartment, and the ferret with his strange,
red eyes gazing at Collin’s expansive feet while my toes curled back from his
sweaty touch. Slowly, I pivoted my body to look at him full in the face.
I remembered what Buddha had said one night at the club,
as I leaned towards her and sipped the straw from her rum and coke. “You ever
think about Collin?” She had a small, puckered mouth, and was chewing on her
bottom lip. Glitter was smeared on her
cheekbones. “I mean, do you ever think he goes too far with doing whatever he
wants to do with us?”
“Don’t we all do that?” I asked, and took another slurp
from her drink.
“It’s like he’s pruning us. Like he thinks we’re his
dolls.” I had looked at Buddha strangely then, unable to see whatever it was
that she had perceived early on about Collin Fromm. Letting out a laugh that
sounded forced, she handed me the rum and coke, and ran to the dance floor to
throw her legs into the air.
Collin was promising me was something I had learned to
stop wanting. When I was fifteen, I had begged my mother one last time before
she slapped me across the face, and told me I should feel blessed for all the
things I had already been given. My hand touched my face, feeling the sting all
over again.
“But how could you afford it?” I said. It came out in a
whisper.
“No worries now. If it’s what you need, you know I’ll
come through.”
“You’re a prince,” I said, smiling now. My lips twitched.
“You’re a man among mice.”
All
that day, I called Brock. I called and called but received no answer, not even
a recorder. I couldn’t decide on what he would think about me getting an
artificial eye. I pictured myself walking down the Broadway of the East Coast,
coming towards him with both of my eyes open, men smiling at me because I had
such a pretty face. No one would be able to tell that there was something off
about me unless they knew where to look. I called again, and fell asleep with
the cell phone pressed to my ear.
Taylor was asleep in my bed next to me when I woke up,
and I was curled up beside her like a cat. No, I realized, I had climbed into
her bed. I listened for a moment to the sound of Taylor softly snoring. I tried
to get up, but Taylor’s bed was full-sized and so much more comfortable than
the couch. I moved away from her, and fell back to sleep on the far side of the
mattress.
Brock
called me early the next morning. “Is this about Buddha?” he asked. “Do you
want me to come see you, or do you need to escape to New York?”
“What’s
wrong with Buddha?” I asked. I shook Taylor awake, and she kicked me sideways
in the chest.
“I’m just fine,” she mumbled, not bothering to raise her
head from the pillow.
I said, “We have to go to the shop. My God, Taylor,
Buddha was shot. King’s was robbed.”
“We don’t have to anything right now. Just lay down, go
to sleep, shut up.”
I
obeyed. Even though I knew the right thing to do was go to King’s, or the
hospital to find Buddha. I lay down next to Taylor, smelled her clean smell of
shampoo mixed in with something else that reminded me of freeze-dried
strawberry ice cream. I stared at a large spider crawling up the wall, and
thought about seeing the world with so many little eyes. My thoughts turned to
Collin, and how much power he had because of how much money he had. I tried to
figure out a way to hold him to the promise of paying for my glass eye, no
matter what went down with King’s. I didn’t know if I was capable of blackmail,
but I wanted the eye that badly. I sighed, and felt Taylor move even farther
away from me.
Then Collin’s wife came to the apartment. She had a key
and let herself in, her sandals sounding sticky on the wood floor as she headed
for Taylor’s bedroom. Not even Collin entered our apartment without knocking. I
got up to get my sweatshirt while Taylor continued to lie sprawled out on the
bed.
Collin’s
wife was pretty. She had that kind of natural beauty I had never noticed
before. Her red curls were piled loosely on top of her head, and the puffiness
around her eyes made her seem romantic. She looked as if she belonged somewhere
green with rabbits and undiscovered wildflowers, where her husband wore a beard
and brought her a buckets of clean water pumped from a nearby stream. I asked
her about Buddha, and her face wrinkled.
With
a long sigh, Taylor stood up. She glared at Collin’s wife with her hip tilted
at an angle. She was in her underwear, her small nipples clearly visible
through her ribbed tank top. “I took the day off from King’s today,” she said.
“There
is no King’s,” said Collin’s wife. Her voice was smooth and calm. It made me
wonder how she dealt with Collin’s music—Johnny Rotten’s voice had to make her
temples’ throb.
“If
you came over here to harass us,” Taylor said, “you should have brought
us tea or some kind of pastries. We’re the type of girls who have people bring
us things. And I’m really thirsty. I need some orange juice, or maybe just a
cup of Earl Grey.”
“Please
don’t pay any mind to Taylor,” I said, reaching over to touch the woman’s
shoulder. She shrank away from my touch. I said, “It’s been a very strange day
so far. What do you know about Buddha?”
“Did you know he was having sex with her, too?” Collin’s
wife said. She brought a hand up to her mouth.
“No,” said Taylor. Her blonde hair spread messily around
her face as she shook her head. “He was with me the whole time.”
“Did you really think you were the only one?” said the
woman. Her thin lips stretched into a smile. I could feel her sense of control,
and knew what this woman had come for. Our beautiful little apartment. I brushed
past Collin’s wife and sat on the couch as I realized how little I owned. Most
of the posters on the wall were Rothko, simple colors paired together that
Collin had framed just for us. Even the lamp belonged to King’s. I reached down
and touched the dark stain on the floor where a glass of wine had seeped into
the woodwork.
“Don’t think my husband didn’t tell me about you, too.” I
looked up to find Collin’s wife standing behind me. It was easy to imagine what
she would look like as a very old woman, and I wondered if this was why Collin
married her. It was obvious that women like Taylor would never survive old age.
I said, “You just found out about me today? I’ve been
working at King’s for quite a while.”
Collin’s wife stared at me, and I inched my finger
underneath my eye patch. “Collin is going to help me get an eye,” I said. “He
gave me his word.”
“His word?” Collin’s wife slipped the gold band off her
finger and waved it in the air. “What do you think this is?”
“Can I have that?” Taylor asked. She stretched her arms
wide and gave a fake yawn, but I could tell her eyes were threatening to tear
up. “When you’re done with it, I mean.”
“Just get away from here,” Collin’s wife said. “Just
leave me and my husband be.”
Taylor’s face softened, and her eyes once again had that
faraway glazed look. It was like watching her build a cocoon around herself.
She gave a lackadaisical stare at Rothko’s Red
over Pink, and I knew that she was through talking to Collin’s wife. “We
need some music in here,” she murmured. Her lips barely moved.
“This isn’t a
party,” Collin’s wife said loudly. Taylor was already humming something. Her
feet padded towards the bathroom, and she left the door open as she sat down to
pee. White panties slipped down to her ankles. Collin’s wife’s pale face
reddened, and her mouth opened in an incredulous laugh. It was as if she was
looking at Taylor for the first time.
When we finally walked to King’s, Taylor and I discovered
that the shop had indeed been robbed. Two men unmasked had taken the money from
the safe, which I knew for a fact had always remained unlocked. Buddha, whose
real name is Chelsea, had been shot in the face. Her body wrapped in a sheet
had already been taken away by the time we arrived. We knew this because everyone
on 4th Street was talking about it, eager to tell the story afresh
to those who didn’t know.
One boy with two matching piercings at the bridge of his
nose said, “They shot the girl like an afterthought. She had already given him
the money and everything.”
“Did you see it happen?” I asked.
“No,” said the boy. He looked at me and touched his left
eye. “But I’ve heard enough people talking about it.”
“Collie!” Taylor screamed. We were standing across the
street, looking at the clothing boutique that should have been able to save our
lives. I looked at Taylor’s face and saw that she looked frightened, as if the
murderer would come after her next. Collin was talking to one of the policemen.
He looked up at us, and then put a hand on his head, and turned back towards
the policeman.
Taylor said, “Look at that horrible old man.” She leaned
in close to me to whisper in my ear. “I can’t handle this right now. Let’s go
get high.”
“You go,” I said. “I want to find out more about Buddha.”
“Come with me,” she said, and linked her arm with mine.
We walked around the corner, and I noticed that the castle of whiskey bottles
was no longer there, and that probably someone had thrown it away without even
bothering to see it for what it was.