The Parallel Apartments (35 page)

The old car had no hood, engine, side-view mirrors, bumpers, headlights, or wheels. It was equipped with heavily tinted windows and a two-part sunroof, one side of which Justine happened to know could be pried off with a slot-head screwdriver that was stuck hilt-deep into the ground by the fence, which was where she left it the last time she played in the old yellow Camaro, back when she was in the seventh grade and wanted privacy to experiment with grapevine-smoking.

And there it was. Yellowed, cracked acrylic handle with a shaft of corroded metal. The sunroof came off easily. Justine lowered herself inside and pulled the sunroof back into place.

Hot, black, quiet as a moon. Justine sat on the decayed, ceramic-hard vinyl backseat, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and to be stung or mauled by the present tenants.

Unoccupied, apparently; no biters forthcame. Interior details resolved: the yawn below the dashboard where the stereo used to be; the Ferragamo shoebox filled with fuses and Phillips
66
gas receipts on the passenger seat; a midrange speaker hanging from the driver's-side door by its weed-like wire roots; the floor of the backseat filled with old Miller High Life cans made of real tin and as uncrushable as mortar casings. On the back of the driver's seat was a poem that Justine had written with her first tube of lip gloss, Bonne Belle Lip Smackers (strawberry), which Charlotte's
friend Nance had given Justine, saying it would go well with her green eyes and maybe the pink jumper she'd seen at the Mervyn's where she worked.

Justine sniffed at the poem: no longer fragrant.

        
The clouds and the sun

        
are fighting

        
the earth,

        
The stars and the moon

        
are lighting

        
the birth,

        
Of the me and the you

        
The we and the us,

        
The scissors and paste and my

        
ugly face,

        
and the life

        
not a pennysworth.

Oh dear. That's terrible.

Hot. She wished she had a Dr Pepper. In this stuffy silence she would be able to hear the minute explosions of carbonation tick musically against the inside of the can, while condensation on the outside collected into little rivers that ran down her forearm.

She lay down across the backseat. She opened her backpack, found a razor, and peeled off its paper wrapper. This particular manufacturer coated the faces of its razors with the merest skin of yellow machine oil, which stung when it got into a cut. Justine wiped the oil away with the tail of her blouse, then placed the edge at an angle on her wrist about an inch below the bottom of her palm and just to the left of the tendon.

During her hospital stay, Justine had roomed with a young woman, a UT doctoral candidate in astrogeology named Jessy Burke, who was wealthy and smart and cultured. She also had a great number of scars on her arms. But unlike Justine's, which were messy and random, Jessy's were neat, straight, parallel, and of uniform depth, breadth, spacing, and longitude. Yet they were not artificially so—she had used no ruler or compass. They were accomplished freehand. Artisanal slices.

“You never go across?” Justine had asked her one afternoon in the sofa room. “Or zigzag? Or just stab?”

“Oh no,” said Jessy, admiring her own left arm, which was just as elegantly scarred as the right.

“How do you get them so straight and neat?” asked Justine politely. She secretly preferred her own scar maps.

Patients had begun wandering into the sofa room. Transition Group, for those fixing to be discharged into quarter-, half-, and three-quarter-way houses, was about to start.

“Are you in this group?” asked Jessy, glaring at some of the moderately smug Transition Group members.

“I wish,” said Justine. “I'm gonna be here forever.”

“Not I. I'm going to sign myself out today. I just come here to make my parents feel guilty for divorcing and remarrying Republican clods.”

“Why'd they get divorced?”

“Daddy used to say it was my fault because I brought home my school friends who tempted him into straying and Mother used to say—or, rather,
scream
—it was because the house was a filthy mess. She always looked at me when she screamed that. And I guess the house
was
a junkyard.”

“You rebelled by making super-orderly cuts?”

“I never thought of it like that,” said Jessy. “Okay. Put your finger like that, like you're holding a… wait, what do you use?”

“Single-edges.”

“Okay. Now, instead of moving the blade, move your arm. Like your pulling on a long white kidskin opera glove. Here, use this.”

Jessy tore the flap off of her flip-top box of Marlboros and gave it to Justine to use as a prop.

“Like that?”

“Like that.”

A fellow patient, Dean Schoomacker, approached them.

He said: “If you guys aren't here for Transition Group you better get the heck out because Transition Group is in the sofa room from three to four on Wednesday afternoons and I'm in the Transition Group so I can stay but everyone else adios amigos.”

“So,” Jessy said, addressing Justine and ignoring Dean, “imagine you're going to see
La Traviata
, you're in a Dior gown, opera glasses in your clutch,
frangipani on your elbows, and a bunch of handsome gentlemen waiting down in the drawing room. You're almost ready.”

“You guys are gonna catch heck,” said Dean.

“All you have left to do?” Jessy whispered to Justine. “Draw on your long white kidskin gloves.”

Justine pushed the corner of the blade into her wrist a millimeter, then two, three; the skin would not split. Four, five: a little blood, token, ran down her forearm, hot, poky—the pure opposite of the condensation from a cold can of Dr Pepper. Six: a thicker thread of blood. Then a giving, like the skin of a grape opening under the press of a jaw.

Would Dot allow her company? Would Justine apologize on behalf of all their survivors? She imagined Dot to be sitting on a stool at the end of a bar, it's the 1940s, she's fishnetted, tough, wily; a drained and upended bourbon tumbler touches her two diaries on the long, wet limewood bar… Dot is the divine issue of a union of Sophia Loren and Nefertiti and there are men and women prostrate before her on an earthen floor, clutching money and apologies and love letters, the great Sherpa and Kelly Miller each in a small, cramped cage swinging in the barroom rafters. Justine enters the bar, and Dot turns to look.

Don't pity me with your blood.

Justine stopped. Justine did not draw on the long white glove.

She sat up and threw the razor down into the compost of Miller beer cans.

“Help!” she screamed, as loud as she could.

She didn't actually want or need any help; she yelled in a pique of disgusted irony. A cry for help. She couldn't kill herself. She'd never really tried in her whole psychopathologically fertile life, never even really wanted to, except earlier today, outside of Dot's car, knees on the blacktop, the door hot against her face. She was a crybaby. She hated herself for her cowardice and hypocrisy, her virtuoso lies and simpleton's guile, her purposeless body and borrowed curiosity, her weedy bromeliads of hair and putatively electrifying green eyes, which to her just looked like botulinal oysters. Her “borderline personality.” She'd never had a real reason to kill herself, just bothersome depressions and bratty outbursts of self-hatred that always ended, rapidly,
following an intramuscular shot of major tranquilizers, firmly attached to a gurney in a five-point restraint.

Justine fell asleep.

She woke to the purr of a prowl car easing down the alley and pointing its spotlight into backyards. The spot swept through the Camaro, but did not fall on Justine. The prowler disappeared down the alley.

Justine climbed out of the car and replaced the sunroof, which popped into place with a Tupperware-like burp. She stabbed the screwdriver back into the ground. It felt good.

She stabbed the dirt again, and again, and again, then stopped in mid-stab.

She stood up, tucked the tool into the waist of her skirt, then walked back to the post office.

The mailbox containing her two letters sat directly beneath a streetlight that buzzed as though it was about to short out, and radiated a nauseating baby-aspirin-orange light. The hinged mouth of the mailbox bore a sticker that indicated the next pickup time as 8:15 a.m. Probably about three hours away.

Justine circled the mailbox. It was held together by rivets and bolted to a crumbly cement plinth.

She opened the mouth and stuck her arm in. Something occluded access to the letters inside. She pulled the mouth open wider; the occlusion grew more occlusive. She closed the mouth to a slit, reaching in as far as she could, but still, occlusion.

She braced a foot on the mailbox and pulled on the mouth-handle; she hammered the mouth with both fists; she slammed the mouth; she forced a small oak branch into the mouth. How loud it all was. But what of it? Who cares? Let 'em take me away to Del Valle. I'm not afraid of jail, you bastards.

The branch broke. Justine fell back with part of the branch in her hand. The mouth swallowed the rest of it.

The mailbox had no screws at all, just big blue rivet after big blue rivet. Justine wedged the head of her screwdriver under one of the rivets and hammered on the end of the handle with her branch. When it was wedged under as far as it would go, Justine pulled.

The corroded metal snapped; Justine fell and landed on her bottom in the concrete parking lot. The screwdriver had broken off unevenly, leaving the shaft with a shallow-beveled chisel tip, sharp as an obsidian arrowhead.

Justine sat down in the grass by the curb to cast loathing at the mailbox and to behold her new tool. She hated the mailbox. It seemed almost alive—it had legs, tiny flat feet, a torso, a digestive system, an empty, rudimentary head. It belched. It was as solid and obstinate as a bison, as arrogant and overbearing as an ID-checker at a Sixth Street bar. Viewed straight on, the mailbox wore the same
golly
expression as may sometimes be seen of the faces of the very, very dim. It was warm. It had a small hole for the insertion of hard keys.

Justine stuck her screwdriver-shiv into the keyhole, and with the branch hammered as hard as she could.

Nothing happened. The lock did not give; the screwdriver did not break.

She looked beneath. The metal seemed softer, thinner. The underbelly. When she pushed on it, it gave a bit, like the lid on a tin of butter cookies, but there was not enough clearance to bang on it, stab it, or even squeeze underneath and bench-press the screwdriver up into the mailbox's guts.

Then, an idea.

She placed the point of the screwdriver into the center of the underbelly, and wedged the handle into the cement at an angle. The more she wedged the handle, the closer to perpendicular its angle became to the cement, the farther the point sank into the underbelly. She picked up her branch again and hit the side of the handle.

Pdnk.
The point pierced the steel creature. Justine pulled the screwdriver out and repeated, over and over, until she had eight or ten tightly clustered quarter-inch holes. From inside it would look like a drain. Then, with some knuckle-flaying jabs and wrenching and torquing, she made a hole large enough to get three fingers into.

The first thing she pulled out was a squarish yellow envelope embossed with the Hallmark logo. It was from Lola Baumgartner to Master Kenny Keene. The extraction process partly shredded the envelope, revealing its contents of a fire-engine-shaped birthday card containing five mint-crisp one-dollar bills.

These were next, all mutilated to a degree by the jagged hole: a postcard in Czech, a phone bill remittance, a letter to the editor of the
Daily Texan,
a letter with a hockey card in it, some wit's sticky Icee cup, a move in a
postal chess match (…f6!), more bill payments, a poem about Canada that one Connie Davis was mailing to herself as a form of copyright protection. A sonnet called “Pigeon Friends.”

A package blocked the hole. It would not unblock no matter how she prodded or shifted or stabbed.

Justine sat back to vibrate in frustration, and to consider her federal crime.

She scooped up all the mail she'd ruined and wandered around the neighborhood, delivering each envelope to its return address. It took two hours. She returned to the mailbox and lay down in the dewy grass nearby with her backpack for a pillow. She tried not to fall asleep. Cars began to drive through the lot to stop and feed the mailbox. The sun rose. It grew warm.

Presently a mail lady cursed with a tiny Victorian waist and wearing a very wide-brimmed straw sun hat appeared, equipped with a canvas bag and a ring of keys. She stooped by the mailbox and began to hunt through her keys.