Jamestown (25 page)
Joe stepped in and loaded a couple more bags full of stuff. Each of us took a bagâwell, they took two each and I took oneâand we jogged back to our town. Things were said, plans were made, but my lungs and legs, not as strong as Frank's and Joe's, kept my brain from knowing what it heard. I know I was assured, in whispers too soft to be heard by the fifty men whose footsteps crackled lightly in the cracked concrete and scrub brush by our side, that my friends' ill treatment of me in our town is a ruse to make our boss and his advisor think things are as they've been.
“Then what,” I asked, “is the purpose of your ill treatment of in the woods?”
“Oh that's just for old times' sake,” Frank said.
This joke, if joke it was, made the dread in me metastasize. Like love, it gobbled up my nerves. It made me want to undermine my friends, and steal a certain thing from them and give it to a girl I like, whose thing it once was anyway, if a thing can be said to belong to a girl, or to anyone, which it can't, since, as has been all but proven for a certitude, you can't take it with and even if you could you wouldn't know what to do with it. The girl, like Joe and Frank, has caused, causes, and will cause me great hurt, but unlike them she doesn't do it out of spite. I'll always love the way she looks and acts, no matter how she makes me feel.
I found her by the black cloud that floats above her head at all times those days. She's curled in a ball on the floor of the jail. The wireless device, which I stole back from Joe for her as per my plan, I lay at her sleeping face. When she wakes it'll be the first thing she sees. The second thing she'll see is me, though thing I'm not, technically, though soon I'll be, and soon after many things, then no thing. The jail is quiet and dark. Her left breast lies on the spot where Jacks Myth's left foot stood when he was kept here two weeks in ropes. No guard stands at the door. No foreigner's been captured, no criminal caught. The jail holds no one, as far as those who do the counting know. Its disuse makes it a good hiding place for an exile, who is an inside-out prisoner. The moon in the eastern sky lays a column of light across her face. As ever, I favor the dark part of the room.
She's still curled up into a little dot. A dot of her's better than a line of most. The left side of her face lies on her folded left arm. Her north eye opens, looks at its closed southern counterpart, closes again. What she saw first, if she saw at all, was not, as I'd guessed, the gift I stole for her, or me, but herself.
“You awake?”
“No.”
“See what I brought you?”
“No.”
“Want to have sex?”
“No.”
“See what I brought you?”
“What'd you bring me?”
“Open your eyes.”
“Don't want to.”
“Then you won't see it.”
“Describe it to me. Is it bigger than a cockroach?”
“Yes.”
“Bigger than a rat?”
“Yes.”
“Bunny rabbit?”
“Same, unless the rabbit's just eaten the rat.”
“Is it my wireless device?”
“I thought you said you didn't see it.”
“I didn't.”
“Liar.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How your whole life has become a lie.”
“I don't lie, I scheme, it's different.”
“You joke but what you're doing is deadly serious.”
“What am I doing?”
“I don't know, why don't you tell me?”
“Nothing.”
Her eyes have not yet opened again. She hasn't moved an inch. She may still be asleep.
“How'd you get the wireless back from Joe?”
“He gave it to me.”
“Liar.”
“I bought it.”
“Liar.”
“I stole it.”
“Liar.”
“Anyway, I just wanted you to have it.”
“Thanks.”
“And see how you are.”
“Fine.”
“And have sex with you.”
“Ugh.”
“What do you do all day?”
“What do
you
do all day?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“No really.”
“I sulk, and then I fill my mind with light.”
“How?”
“I sit in a place where I'm undetected and unobstructed. My legs are crossed, my back is straight, my posture easeful yet erect. It helps me to imagine an enormously long cable attached at one end to the crown of my head and at the other to a helicopter that hovers soundlessly above the clouds. Then the sulking begins. It comes quite naturally: all I have to do is think. To think and be sad are one for me now. âThought is the indwelling of the father in the head of the child.' You know that proverb?”
“No.”
“I just made it up.”
“But how do you go from thinking and sulking to filling your mind with light?”
“I'm telling you how.”
“You're not.”
“If you'd shut up.”
“Okay.”
“I see.”
“What?”
“I see instead of think.”
“How?”
“By seeing as fast as I can.”
“But how can you see without thinking? When you look at a thing, isn't your mind naming it and qualifying it for your eyes?”
“Your eyes have to outrun your mind. You see and see and see so fast your mind tries to keep up, gets tired, has a heart attack and dies. Then it's just you and your eyes, and the green air leading the world into them.”
“What does that feel like?”
“It feels like the world is getting lighter and lighter and lighter until you can't see it anymore.”
“Is that what you do all day?”
“I run a lot.”
“How do you eat?”
“I steal food, or get it from Char, or I disguise myself and take my meals among the unsuspecting people of our town.”
“Who do you disguise yourself as?”
“Different people. This morning I disguised myself as a squirrel, and accompanied you along the branches of the trees to the interlopers' sad little town. That's how I know about your traitorous heart.”
“Is it not treason to love one of them without even knowing him?”
“If the gods had made woman to love a man only after she knows him, no woman would ever love.” Her eyes, which have been closed until this time, open. “You brought this back to me so I could contact him.”
“Yes.”
“You're very sweet.”
“Shut up.”
“I love you.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Stickboy.”
“While you let in the light, I let in the darkness,” I say, and shut my eyes. When I open them she's gone, and so am I.
Three
06:01:43
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| No |
| G REASY B OY : | Hi. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Have you ever dated a woman much older than yourself? |
| G REASY B OY : | But you're younger than I am. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Have you? |
| G REASY B OY : | Why are you asking me this? |
| C ORN L UVR : | Must we build the wheel before we roll along on it? |
| G REASY B OY : | Yes. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Then this is going to take forever and be tedious. |
| G REASY B OY : | No I mean yes, Iâve dated a woman older than myself. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Much older? |
| G REASY B OY : | How much is much? |
| C ORN L UVR : | Ugh. |
| G REASY B OY : | I was an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Communications. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Iâd never have guessed you went to college. |
| G REASY B OY : | I was going to have an affair with one of the martial arts instructors but then her back went out. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Out where? Remember English is not my first language. |
| G REASY B OY : | Apparently bullshit is your first language. |
| C ORN L UVR : | And that was that? |
| G REASY B OY : | What was what? |
| C ORN L UVR : | That was the end of the affair? |
| G REASY B OY : | I guess it's hard to have an affair with a bad back. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Was she beautiful? |
| G REASY B OY : | Yes. She had puffy hair. She was thirty-eight, to answer your other question. |
| C ORN L UVR : | What was she like? |
| G REASY B OY : | Sad. |
| C ORN L UVR : | How do you know? |
| G REASY B OY : | The back pain. |
| C ORN L UVR : | What's that got to do with it? |
| G REASY B OY : | Body pain always has its duplicate in mind. |
| C ORN L UVR : | You think you know women. |
| G REASY B OY : | I didn't say that. I think I understood that woman, a little. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Maybe less than you think. |
| G REASY B OY : | You're not one of those women, are you? |
| C ORN L UVR : | Which? |
| G REASY B OY : | Who think men do not and will never understand women, especially herself. |
| C ORN L UVR : | It's not impossible, just unlikely. |
| G REASY B OY : | And do women understand men? |
| C ORN L UVR : | Better. |
| G REASY B OY : | Why? |
| C ORN L UVR : | Because women are more like men than men are like women. |
| G REASY B OY : | Horse dukey. |
| C ORN L UVR : | What's dukey? |
| G REASY B OY : | Teeth. |
| C ORN L UVR : | Gotta go bye! |
| G REASY B OY : | When can I meet you? |
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