Lullaby for the Rain Girl (29 page)

“Ha! You don’t have the balls.”

“My balls have slapped against your privates often enough that you should know I
do.”

“You have a point. I dunno. They’re not ready. They’re not as good as you think they are.”

“They’re good.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I’ll get around to it someday. And if they take one we’re going to have a party like you’ve never seen.”

“Well...maybe you need to slow down on the partying, Rachel.”

“Oh, don’t be a poopy drawers.”

“I’m not. It’s just...”

“Jesus Christ, Benja-me-me, I come from the High Plains of fucking
North Dakota.
I lived there! For eighteen years! I feel like—like I have to make up for lost time, you know? Like it’s time to
live.”

“That’s what I want, too. For you to live.”

“Shit. Stop worrying. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. Have you noticed the rings under your eyes?”

“So I’m a raccoon. What of it?”

“Rachel...”

“I just need more sleep, that’s all. Really. That’s all it is. Sleep.”

# # #

Once I dreamed we were having sex when she became nauseous and threw up on both of us. I woke to find vomit all over the bed and Rachel next to me, unconscious.

# # #

“I never knew.”

“What?”

“What you told the doctor. That you once tried to kill yourself.”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t do a very good job. That was back in Fargo. Feels like a million years ago.” She held up her left wrist. “You can hardly make them out now, but there are two little white scars—see?”

“Yes. You’re right, they’re almost invisible. I never noticed them.”

“I didn’t slice deep enough.”

“Jesus, Rachel.”

“Hey,” she smiled, “that’s all in the past. Now shut up and fuck me.”

9

“The Burning Girl”
by Benjamin Fall

When she came, he no longer remembered. It seemed they had been together every day and night of their lives, since time itself began; but dimly, softly in the distant chambers of his mind he recalled growing up: boyhood, school: softly, dimly. None of it made any difference now. Not since she’d come.

She: in bed now, lips twitching in shallow sleep. Her face sweat-slick, hair greasy and splayed across the pillow like strands of rotting rope. She was naked, with only a damp sheet partly covering her; but no one, walking into the room now, would particularly notice her nudity.

Instead they would see her scars. Up and down her cheeks in vertical lines, across her neck in black blotches, down her shoulders and breasts and arms and hands in angry blue and black flame-patterns—scars were everywhere on her body, some old and time-hardened, others fresh and raw and still oozing sticky translucent liquid.

She was waking now, kicking at the sheets and moaning. He watched her eyelids flutter. He knew better than to try to apply ointments or damp cloths to her body; they only, she said, made it worse. Instead he simply waited as the fluttering became more rapid, then slowed. At last her eyes opened.

“I’m so hot,” she whispered.

It was what she always said. The room was cool. 

He held a glass of water to her cracked lips. She swallowed.  An odd, unpleasant odor emanated from her, part perspiration, part urine, part...what?

Burning flesh
, he knew. That was it. It was impossible, but she smelled as if her flesh were burning at this moment, in front of him. He had been aware of it before but it had never been as strong as this and he had never been able to identify it. Now he could. He looked at her.

“Better?” he asked, placing the water glass on the table beside them.

“A little.” She sat up, grunting painfully. “Could you turn on the air conditioner?”

“It’s already on. And the fan.”

“Oh.” She scowled. “Okay.”

She’d had scars, of course, when he first met her—whenever that had been. He’d noticed them first on her hands, thin gray pencil lines which snaked around her palms and fingers.  There were lines on her face, too—so pale as to be hardly noticeable. The first time they’d gone to bed together he’d seen the other scars too. But they were light as well, nothing like they were now. She’d been self-conscious about them: “Do I look too awful?” she’d asked. Of course he’d said she was beautiful. And she was, in a strange way. Like, he thought, a Greek statue, broken, in ruins, yet hauntingly graceful and true.

“Robert?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

For a long moment he said nothing.

“Do you?” she said.

“I love you.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Of course I mean it, Robin.”

Robert and Robin: too cute for words.

“Are they worse today?” she asked.

He looked at her shoulders and breasts. “It’s hard to tell.”

But they were worse every day. They both knew that. What was different now was the smell, the terrible, acrid smell of burning which filled the room.

“I’m so hot,” she said.

He picked up an old newspaper from the floor and fanned her gently with it.

“Will you go out today?” she asked.

“I have to. There’s no food.”

She looked at him. “Please don’t be gone long.”

# # #

Being out in the world, among people, was unreal now. It was if they—all those anonymous others—were automatons, or rather holograms: illusions. He felt as if they were all underwater, as if the world itself were, and he somehow glided through it untouched, unaffected. He bought oranges, apples, bread, different types of drinks. The paper sack felt strange in his hands, like putty or clay, as he carried it back to the apartment. When he arrived he found her asleep again, grinding her teeth, head moving slowly back and forth, hands clenched into fists, balling up the sheets and pulling at them.

# # #

“Robert?”

“Yes.”

“Are they worse today?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Be honest.”

“It’s hard to tell.”

He listened to the air conditioner humming, felt the gentle swooping wind of the overhead fan on his face.

“I’m so hot,” she said.

# # #

It had started not long after she’d moved in—whenever that was. He’d taken the scarred girl in and they lived as a normal couple for a time. They made love, ordered Chinese takeout, went to movies. When he went to work in the morning she would stay home and sometimes, on her good days, she made a meal for them in the evening. (She wasn’t much of a cook, but she could throw together simple ingredients well enough.) He never asked her about the scars, assuming she would tell him when she was ready. But she was never ready.

She did say other things. She told him about growing up in the High Plains, about losing her parents, about her dead sister, about the relatives she lived with throughout her adolescence; and about kicking across the country alone, aimlessly, imagining that someday she would arrive in Hollywood and “be discovered.”

“But nobody discovered me, Robert,” she’d said once, wanly, “until you did.”

It had taken some time for him to realize that her scars were gradually becoming worse.

There was no explanation for it. She’d gone to doctors—or she said that she had—who looked at her quizzically and gave her some basic medicines for burns. And she did have a few old prescription bottles in the bathroom, half-filled with pills she never took. Not long after they’d moved in together she’d begun to have long weeping bouts, awful long howlings. He would hold her, comfort her, quiet her. But they always came back. She seemed to him to be in some kind of pain he could never understand, never even theoretically comprehend: such hurt, such loss, such breakage.

He’d resolved to save her. He made her eat well, exercise. They went for long walks together, mostly far from the main streets where people would turn and stare at the girl with the scars. Instead they strolled in woods, near lakes. They ate at roadside restaurants. He told jokes, which brightened her. They had good days.

But always—always—her sorrow returned. The weeping. The screaming into her pillow. The ever-darkening scars.

He no longer believed that he could save her.

# # #

Watching her day after day, night upon night, he found his mind wandering into strange, crepuscular places, toward shadow-haunted memories he’d not thought of in decades, old pains and sadnesses and humiliations. He was helpless, he knew. Trapped. No, he could not save her.

# # #

“Robert?”

“How—how do you feel?”

A pause. “I’m so hot.”

The smell was overwhelming in the room now. As he looked at her it seemed as if she must literally burst into flames at any moment, the burning odor was so powerful. He could see few of her features now; she was covered over almost completely with the awful blue-black scars.

“Robert?”

“Yes.”

“Will—will you make love to me?”

“Robin...you’re not...you can’t...”

“I want you to.”

“I’m afraid to touch you.”

“Don’t be. It’s all right. Please.”

“I’ll hurt you.”

“You won’t.”

He lay beside her, studying her charred, leathery face. He reached to place a hand on her shoulder but drew back. He realized suddenly that he was crying, that he had been crying for a very long time.

# # #

He had a dream: flame-spark, smoke-swirl, long screams reverberating through caverns of hollow darkness. His mother was there, drunk, accusing, eyes huge and glowering and spiraling wildly like kaleidoscopes. His father, teeth big and gleaming and sharp as a saber-toothed tiger’s, reaching to him, ripping at his hair, pulling him, shaking him.
No-good shit-eater! Useless  punk!
He woke: but the waking was not different from the dreaming, not now: he was everything they’d said, he knew. There was the incontrovertible evidence, there before him: the girl, the burning girl, motionless now.

Was she dead? he wondered. He couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she was breathing, very shallowly. Perhaps there was movement in her eyelids. He leaned to her chest and thought he sensed a heartbeat. But it could be his own heart that he was hearing. Perhaps there was no difference between them now, their two hearts together, beating, not-beating.

Sweat-drenched, he turned onto his back and stared at the fan spinning overhead. He was very hot. Then he glanced toward her once more. She looked no different. The odor of burning was sickeningly strong.

The moving air felt strange on his skin, somehow. He wondered about it. After a time he raised his hands and looked at them, the blades of the fan behind appearing to slice at them again and again, endlessly.

His hands were covered with scars.

9

Much of it is a blank to me now. The middle of the night, darkness. Weeping. A great deal of weeping. She was fired from the restaurant.

# # #

“Alice?”

“Hey, little bro. How’s it going?”

“I—fine. I just thought I’d call...”

“So how’s life?”

“Life’s life’s good.”

“How’s the roommate working out?”

“Good...good.”

“Keeping the rent paid?”

“Sure.”

“You okay? You sound kind of...”

“I’m okay.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

# # #

Frozen, helpless, I carried out my tasks at school and at the restaurant like an automaton. I couldn’t bring myself to try to take her to a hospital, though I knew that was what she needed. I searched every day for signs that she was recovering: a better-than-average appetite for breakfast, her laughter at a TV sitcom, her managing to get dressed and going out to the store. I clung to such things because there were few of them by that point. Mostly she stayed in bed, or else she sluffed about the apartment naked or in a ratty old bathrobe of mine. She smoked a lot, cigarettes and weed. So did I.

I never showed her “The Burning Girl.”

But she seemed quite vividly present when we were in bed together. She’d stopped writing—so had I—but at night we still fucked as physically as before, especially if we turned on the video camera. I never hit her, as she asked for again and again. Nonetheless our sex had a violent quality to it that was as disturbing as it was addictive. She begged me to do things which couldn’t possibly bring her any pleasure, things that could only cause pain. I did them—at least some of them. I found myself growing angry during sex, feeling all my rage and frustration—at Rachel, at Sherry, at my own life—pouring itself out, and I would grab her bodily, hurl her onto the bed, fuck her fast and hard and dirty, practically rape her. But she encouraged me all the way. I would be satiated by the end, and disgusted. Later she would watch the tape, the glow from the television screen illuminating her smiling face.