Please (2 page)

AFTER THAT I BEGAN spending all my spare time in movie theaters. There was one -- a Cineplex Odeon with eight screens and Starbucks coffee -- that I went back to over and over. It had air conditioning, and by the time I left my nose would be running, like I had a cold. Whenever one movie ended, I'd get up and go to the next one. Sometimes I'd come in halfway through it, sometimes it would be just beginning.

Once, a man in dress pants and a golf shirt sat right beside me. He held a bag of popcorn between his legs and asked me if I wanted any. I moved up several rows, and he didn't follow me.

Another time an usher woke me by shining a flashlight into my eyes. "You've been here all day," he said.

"I paid, I paid," I told him. I looked at the screen, but it was blank, the curtain drawn. There was no one else in the theatre.

"You paid for one show," he said. "You've been here all day." He was young, a teenager, with slicked-back hair and a thin moustache.

"I fell asleep."

"You have to leave before the next movie starts." He kept shining the flashlight in my eyes, even though the house lights were on.

"The place is empty," I said. "What difference does it make?"

"The difference is that you only paid for one show."

"Come on," I said. "Help a man out."

"Do you really want me to get the manager?" he asked.

BUT I HAVE TO tell you about what happened in the blind man's room.

We smoked a joint that tasted like cinnamon. He told me it was laced with a mild hallucinogen. "It's the only way I can see these days," he said.

We were sitting on his bed, and he'd taken his glasses off. He was staring at a spot two inches over my head. Now that I looked at him close, I could see his eyes were all scarred and the skin of his face pocked, like someone had taken a small knife to him. I was fully expecting him to make a pass at me, but he never did.

At some point in the night I asked him, "What kind of home is this?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, is everyone who lives here blind or deaf or something?"

"Oh yeah. But none of us were born this way, we were all normal once. You can't get in here unless you've been in an accident or something. Like the deaf guys. One of them blew his own eardrums out when he shot himself in the head."

"He shot himself in the head and he didn't die?"

"Yeah, it hit his skull and traveled around, went out the back. Never even touched his brain. But it made him deaf for some reason. The doctors couldn't explain it."

"What about the other one?" I asked.

"I don't know. It was some disease or something."

"Jesus," I said. "I had no idea there were places like this."

"You should see the people upstairs," he said. "Some of them can't even walk. They just lie in their rooms all day, watching television and talking to God, if they can even do that."

"I couldn't live like that," I told him.

"Maybe not," he said, "but what else can you do?"

There were no lamps in his room, but I could still see because there was light coming in through the window, from somewhere close. I got up and opened the blinds. The neighbouring house was only five or six feet away. I was looking into someone's kitchen. It was a big room, with an island in the center and stainless-steel pots hanging everywhere. It looked like an Ikea display. There was a woman sitting on the island, in between a wooden dish rack and a stack of magazines. Her skirt was pulled up around her hips, and a man was kneeling in front of her, his head and one of his hands between her thighs. She was looking right at me. I wasn't sure if they were really there or if I was just imagining them. Looking back on it now, I'm pretty sure I imagined them. But back then, I just didn't know.

"I think your neighbours are fucking," I told the blind man.

"You can see my neighbours?" He stood and came over to the window, turned his head from side to side.

The woman kept looking out her window but didn't seem to notice either one of us. She leaned back on one hand and ran the other through the man's hair. He had a bald spot at the back of his head.

"You can really see them?" he asked. "Where are they?"

"They're in the kitchen. They're fucking right there on the counter."

"Tell me what they look like," the blind man said. He had his hand on my arm again.

"She looks like the kind of woman you'd see on television," I said. "I don't know about him. I can't see his face because he's going down on her."

"Really?" He leaned forward, until his nose touched the glass.

"She's got her legs wrapped around his shoulders and everything," I told him.

"Wow. What are her tits like? Are they big?"

"I don't know, she's still dressed. She's just pulled up her skirt."

"But what do they look like? Do they look big?"

"They're all right, I guess."

"What about her panties?"

"I don't know. I can't see them. Maybe she wasn't wearing any."

"And her skirt?"

"It's a red floral thing. And a white shirt. Some sort of silk material."

"Oh yeah," he said. "I can see it."

The two of us stood there in silence for a moment, me watching this couple having sex, the blind guy staring in their direction and not seeing anything, or maybe seeing something only he could see, and the woman staring back at us. If she was even there at all.

She closed her eyes when she came. From this close, I could see the flush to her skin. The man stood up and grabbed a dishtowel from the counter, wiped his face with it. She hit him lightly on the shoulder and laughed as she hopped off the counter. They went out of the kitchen and didn't come back again. I never did see the man's face.

"Tell me what they're doing now," the blind man said when they were gone.

COULD I AFFORD YOU? By Peter Darbyshire

I WAS SITTING BESIDE an actor. We were talking to each other's reflections in the mirror behind the bar.

"I had an audition today," he told me. "They're going to pay me ten thousand dollars to be a body double." He shook his head like he was disappointed.

"What is it, some kind of stunt?" I asked.

"No, it's for this sex scene. You don't even get to see my face." He sipped his drink, some sort of martini, and sighed.

The bar was empty except for us and the one waitress working. It was two in the afternoon. He'd walked in and sat on the stool beside me, started talking like he was a friend of mine. He'd even bought me a beer. For that I had to listen to him.

"You should have seen the audition," he went on. "I thought it would be something personal, you know? Maybe me and the director in some locked room somewhere. A lot of talk about motivation and that kind of thing."

"Something intimate," I said.

"Exactly. Only it was nine fucking a.m. in this bright office, and there were two other people in there with him. The director of photography and some woman lawyer." "Why'd they have a lawyer there?"

"I don't know. Something to do with lawsuits. Anyway, the audition consisted of me having to act the scene out. Only they made me do it with this blow-up doll instead of with a real person."

"You fucked a doll? With other people in the room?"

"No, no, I didn't fuck it. I acted like I was making love to it. It was an audition, remember?"

"I don't know," I said, "I don't think I could have done that."

"Oh, it wasn't so bad."

"Was it one of those lifelike dolls?" I asked. "The kind with the holes and everything?"

"You're missing the point here," he said.

WHEN I WASN'T working, I spent most of my time at The Code. It was one of those underground bars, the kind that no matter when you leave, you're always walking up into the light. The walls were covered in old movie posters. Bogart, Dean, Hepburn. It was always filled with beautiful people. There was some sort of modeling studio in the building upstairs and a Club Monaco across the street. The actor told me that all the movie stars drank there when they were in town. It was like I was living in L.A. or someplace like that.

The waitresses got to know me by name. They never charged me for more than six or seven drinks. One of them - she was Indian or Asian, I couldn't really tell - wanted to be a model, but she had a lazy eye, so she was never going to get any work. She called herself Mercedes, but I didn't think that was her real name. I was in love with her even though she was going out with the actor.

One night she sat with me at the bar after her shift was done. There was a man in a leather body suit a few stools down, drinking a Scotch. We all watched one of those medical shows on television. A team of surgeons was operating on a baby still in the womb. They cut open the mother and then cut open the baby inside her. They were playing Vivaldi in the operating room to keep the patients calm. There was something wrong with the baby's spine, but the announcer said it would be okay after the surgery.

"Imagine that," I said. "If someone fixed all your problems before you were born."

"Why wouldn't she just abort it and try again?" Mercedes asked.

"Just think about it," I told her. "What if someone had fixed your eye before anyone else had a chance to see it? Where would you be then?"

She lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. "Why is it that you never go home?" she asked.

"What would I do there?"

"What do you do here?"

I turned back to the television. "The important thing," I said, "is that the baby is all right."

At some point in the night - I don't remember if it was before or after the surgery show - the man in the leather suit came over to us. "Would you like to come into the back room with me?" he asked Mercedes.

"I don't think so," she said.

"You don't have to do anything," he said. "You can just watch."

"Hey," I said, but neither one looked at me.

"I have a boyfriend," she said.

"Bring him along."

"Does your wife know you do this?"

"Married? I'm not married."

"I can see the ring mark on your finger." It was true - there was a thin band of scar tissue around his ring finger, as if he'd been married for years.

"Divorced," he said. "I can't even remember her name."

"That's what they all say," she said.

"How about if I pay you?" he asked. "Just to watch, like I said."

"You couldn't afford me."

"What about you?" he said, looking at me for the first time. "Could I afford you?"

THE CODE HAD a room in the back that was only for special events. The walls were painted black, and all the furniture was covered in white sheets. There were no windows. When there wasn't an event taking place, you could only get in with a key that was kept behind the bar. Sometimes the lights inside were red.

Every Monday there was a fetish party in the room. All night long people would walk in wearing leather or latex or even plastic. Sometimes men would show up in heels or fishnet stockings. Women with safety pins in their cheeks and arms. Once I saw a man leading a woman by a chain tied around her neck.

But mainly it was normal people, people in suits or dressed like you and me. They came in and had a drink or two at the counter and then changed in the washroom. When they came out they'd be wearing handcuffs or corsets or sometimes just leather underwear.

I wanted to look inside, to see what they did in there, but you had to pay ten dollars at the door. The man who'd asked Mercedes to go back there ran the parties and he stood outside the door most of the night with a little cash box. And the people inside all laughed and shouted at each other like they belonged there.

Once, though, no one at all showed up. It was raining so hard a storm sewer outside had overflowed, and water was trickling down the stairs into The Code. Mercedes was out with the actor. He'd picked her up after work, and the two of them had gone up into the storm, leaving me alone at the bar.

Now the man who ran the fetish nights - he later told me his name was Christopher, "like the saint" - was sitting beside me, drinking another Scotch. This time he wore leather pants with a mesh shirt that had no back. I could see his pierced nipples through the shirt. We were watching the television above the bar, but something was wrong with it - it kept flipping channels on its own, every few seconds.

"How come you haven't come to any of the parties yet?" Christopher wanted to know.

"It's not really my scene," I told him.

"You don't know until you try," he said.

"I don't think so."

The television finally seemed to settle on the Discovery Channel, but then the screen went dead as the power went out. There was only the light of the candles to see by. I waited for the power to come back up but it didn't.

"Someone must have hit a line somewhere," Christopher said. "We'll probably be this way for a while."

I thought about going home and looked out the front door. It was raining harder than before. I didn't even own an umbrella.

"We could go back there now," he said. "While we're waiting."

I pulled a couple of candles closer and didn't say anything, just looked up at the dead television.

"I won't even charge you."

THE AIR IN THE back room smelled like it had been in there for years. All the couches and chairs had been pulled up against the walls, and the fetish gear filled the center of the room. There were large wooden crosses you tied people to, and benches for kneeling on, and padded handcuffs hanging from the ceiling beams.

"Try anything you want," Christopher said. He leaned against one of the crosses and watched me.

"I'm just looking," I said.

"There's more in the corner," he said, pointing at a stack of boxes.

There was everything inside them - crumpled leather gloves, plastic balls with straps attached, wooden paddles. I put on a zippered face mask with no mouth hole, only openings for the nose and eyes. It tasted of salt.

"It's you," Christopher said.

Another box held a collection of whips. I pulled up the mask so I could speak. "What are these for?" I asked.

"What do you think they're for?"