The Blondes (14 page)

He was leaning on the edge of his desk, and I was maybe six inches away from him when he said, “What are you waiting for, a spanking?”

“Are you being inappropriate with me, Dr. Mann?” I asked, but I was smirking. I didn’t have much going for me, but I could smirk. Boy, could I. “Go ahead. Spank me, Dr. Mann.” I looked at him like I didn’t think he’d dare—and I didn’t—but part of me also knew he would.

I moved a little closer, about an inch or two away. And then he said, “All right, then,” and grabbed me around the back and pulled me to him. Let’s just say I went very easily
over his lap. I was wearing a dress and knee socks, and I felt the skirt ride up slightly on my thighs.

“You’re a very bad girl, Hazel. You have potential, but you must learn to apply yourself.” His voice was soft, with a hitch in it.

I let my hair fall over my face, and I looked at the floor, which was dusty. For a second I wondered if I was really over his lap, or just imagining it because of the weed. Then I felt his hand land with a forceful slap on my right buttock. I gasped. We both laughed. I turned my head and looked back at him. My big rump arched over his lean hips. I liked the way it looked, like a Jan Saudek photograph. Through the thin black cotton of my dress I could feel him, hard against my belly. Then Karl glanced at the door, which was open. Maybe that’s all it would have been, one playful moment, something inappropriate but easily smoothed over the next day and forgotten, had I not got up, gone to the door of his office, and looked down the dim hall in either direction. I closed the door and returned to my position.

That was how it started. The next week Karl agreed to be my thesis adviser.

HOW MANY STORIES AM I TELLING YOU?
I wonder if Grace has gone all the way back to Toronto, and if she has, whether the city is functioning as usual or collapsing in ruins.

I can imagine Grace going back to her and Karl’s condo. She may have left it because there was too much of their life together there—but at least it doesn’t have me in it, toting around this big lump of you. A constant reminder. I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t come back. When I came here, I thought I was driving toward something, but when Grace came here, she was driving away from everything. She abandoned it all, including her job. Just walked away. Maybe the money is running out … Karl never cared about money, which made me think he had plenty. But you never know. I can see him and Grace keeping everything separate, right down to the bitter end.
It’s hard for me to imagine that they were in love once, hard to imagine Grace as young as me, flirting, playing. Hard to imagine Grace happy with anyone or anything, including Karl. I can’t imagine them running out to do something as permanent—or perhaps simply spontaneous—as marriage.

If I recall my third-year philosophy course correctly, Schopenhauer said, “Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.” Schopenhauer also wrote, in
Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will
, “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.” Although, if I recall, sometimes that second
want
was also interpreted as
control
or
determine
: “A man can do what he wants, but not determine what he wants.” Yes, that’s it, and although I never heard the name Schopenhauer on Karl’s lips, both these ideas strike me now as being very true to Karl.

It’s dark now, the kind of dark where there’s nothing, where the world could cease to exist on the other side of that hill and you wouldn’t even know it. It was only half an hour ago that the sky was holding the light among the branches, like water cupped between fingers and palms. Now it’s so black out there, even the memory of light feels distant. You can hear the silence. It’s like the sound of your own blood.

I don’t know which terrifies me more: the effects the virus has had on the world, or that it could circle invisibly and descend upon us in the first place.

Because it was a Monday morning flight, the terminal was packed. I quickly realized that people were waiting in line as if they didn’t know how to use the self-serve machines. I got my boarding pass from an abandoned automatic kiosk. I weighed my suitcase, and watched it sail away from me on a conveyor. Time was on my side, but there were still two more lines to navigate before coffee and the gate. People were muttering with dissatisfaction and nervousness, the way they do in those situations. The sound travelled upward into the metal beams.

In the check-in line, I stood beside a ratty-looking traveller. She had on a pair of bright pink Doc Martens and was wearing pins that said
Drink Fight Fuck
, and
Know Your Riots
. Bold of her, I thought, to wear them through Security. As the Doc girl and I shuffled forward, we passed an ownerless knapsack.

“Is that yours?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

I looked around at the people in our line, which doubled back and forth on itself, and I started to think
bomb
. I was about to gesture to a security officer when a lanky white guy with a beard loped over, plucked the knapsack up by its handle, slung it over his shoulder, and ducked under the rope into line. He excused himself past several people and joined his friend farther up.

After our boarding passes were scanned we entered Security. Mascara and lip gloss already in Ziploc baggies. Shoes off, clogs purposely worn for speed. No belt. Laptop out of bag into grey bin. The officers waved us forward and pushed us back like traffic cops. Next to one line they had erected an
easel that said:
ALL BLONDES
MUST
USE THIS LINE
. Below the English, it said the same thing in several languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, and Arabic. A female officer was going through our lineup, pulling out the blondes, and waving them over to the other area.

A blonde middle-aged woman insisted she wanted to stay with her male business partner and asked the officer if the partner could come with her.

The security officer nodded and gestured them off.

I couldn’t see where the lineup went; it verged away from ours, seemingly into another room.

I walked through the metal detector without incident. On the other side, a black female guard ran the hand-detector over my clothes, and as she did so, she asked me how I was feeling. Had I had any pain or headaches lately? I told her I felt fine and she stood aside. I picked up my possessions and sunk my feet back into my shoes. An officer wearing blue latex gloves was feeling the lymph nodes of the
Drink Fight Fuck
girl. The girl was standing very still and I didn’t recognize her at first because her khaki jacket and Docs were off; a chipped pink toenail showed through a hole in one of her black fishnet socks. In spite of the rubber gloves, the guard seemed to be holding her gently between thumbs and fingers, the way you might before you kiss someone. It was almost tender.

In my mind, what happened next is almost orderly. Every detail is in sequence, just like putting one foot in front of the
other. But I have a feeling that when I try to say it out loud, it won’t come out that way.

I was about to spend my last six dollars on a coffee. I was standing at the coffee counter and had just reached the front when the sound floated toward us—a faint roar from the direction of the gates. Everyone looked. Two security officers jogged past. Their hands cupped the tops of their weapons.

I tried to order my coffee, but the barista was staring off over my shoulder. That was when a gym bag flung with force knocked over a rotating bookstand beside us. People were running in our direction. Instinctively, the people in our line dispersed, ducking under the ropes and scrambling back toward Security, that barrier we’d all been so anxious to clear. Beside me, a man dropped his recently acquired coffee on the floor and grabbed his wife by the hand, yanking her away, her cup still sitting on the counter.

It was The Blondes. And that’s what we called them after that day, as if their violence had instantly had resulted in a new social class.

There were seven or eight of them, all flight attendants, moving quickly. Wearing navy blazers, they tore through the airport’s wide aisles. One of the attendants grabbed a boy by the shoulders—he looked about twelve—and flung him directly at a security officer. The two collapsed to the floor, boy and officer in a tangle, and the blonde kept coming. Her hair was untucked, pins dangling. It spilled over her uniformed shoulders. I saw all of this, but I also experienced it as a blur, commotion, little bits and pieces.

A golf cart driven by security officers spun around the corner. It was going at top speed and it knocked out one of the Starbucks line posts with the corner of its bumper.

You see, I’m not telling this right. It sounds comical, even to me. Part of the difficulty has to do with the fact that they
were
very beautiful women. But more than that, I can only say what happened, only repeat a sequence of events. There’s a sound to terror, which is the sound of human reaction. A jumble of voices, all shouting and muttering.

People had plastered themselves to the walls; some were crowding into stores. The bookstand next door began cranking its gate shut, sealing off the area with a curtain of metal bars. Some travellers sat, stunned, on benches, as if continuing to wait for departure. Others were gathering their things. Everything happened fast. It’s only when you try to tell it that you slow it down and it sounds absurd.

One of the cabin-crew members snatched a cellphone from a bystander’s hand and hurled it. Far off down the aisle, another of them had grabbed an old woman by the hair. I watched as she yanked the woman along, her victim’s stockinged ankles dragging until one foot caught in the leg of a seat at the end of a row. The elderly woman used it to her advantage, to hold herself back. I looked away before her ankle could snap; instinctively, I knew that would be the outcome. When I glanced back the woman had been dragged a few more yards before something worse happened, which was that chunks of her scalp tore off in the flight attendant’s hands. The blonde looked at the spongy patches and then cast them
away, leaving the old woman sprawled and bleeding on the carpet. All around me rose a din of awe and horror.

The security guard driving the cart stood up and administered a Taser, an electric arc materializing between him and the aggressive flight attendant. Another guard leapt out and chased down one of the other psychotic crew members. Picking up a deserted window-extension pole that had been abandoned by a cleaning cart, the blonde spun in circles, her hands and the pole held out as if everyone around her posed a threat and she didn’t want to turn her back. The officer grabbed the pole, twisted it from her, and brought it to her throat, expertly subduing her against the wall. Everyone was shouting.

I realized the coffee shop was trying to crank down its “Closed” barrier, so I put both hands on the counter and heaved myself over it. I banged my shoulder on the barrier as it came down on top of me, and tore my knee on the espresso machine. Something sharp cut into me, but I barely processed it. Hot liquid from a left-behind cup on the counter spilled everywhere. The surface slippery, my body skated off it heavily onto the floor. I landed on a syrup bottle that went down with me but thankfully didn’t shatter. I remember the barista who had been about to serve me was screaming, as if I were a threat, one of
them
.

“Get out! Get her out!” she kept shrieking to her co-worker, backing away.

“Take it easy,” I told her. I struggled to get up off the floor. I adjusted my glasses, which had been knocked askew. She stopped panicking pretty quickly, and we watched through the
thick, transparent plastic of the barrier as more carts of airport staff arrived and began directing the human traffic out of the area. These new officers were wearing white surgical masks and gloves. They must have been directed to protect themselves first.

One of the blondes made a mad chase after a woman with a stroller who had started to run. The pink-faced toddler in the stroller opened her mouth in a wide wail. She was followed by a female officer in a bulletproof vest who sprinted down the long aisle. We all jumped back as the officer grabbed the blonde and crashed with her into the plastic shield that separated them from us. The window rattled and rolled as they bounced against it. Cheek first, the flight attendant was slammed into it repeatedly—the officer just kept jerking her. The blonde had this twisted expression, smeared against the safety glass in pink lipstick and pancake makeup. We watched her tooth hit the barrier and her lip crack open. Blood was painted back and forth with each movement as the officer—who was no taller than me, five-one or so—single-handedly subdued her. She slapped cuffs onto the struggling flight attendant’s wrists, a knee firmly planted in her back.