When Watched (18 page)

She stared.

“You fucking said that to me last night.”

“Oh.”

“It's the name of a Dan Hicks song.”

“Okay.”

He stared. “Are you even listening?”

She took a drag and the smoke seemed to vanish inside her. “My mom died,” she said.

“What?”

“She fell.”

“When did this happen?”

“This morning. They just called me.”

“Shit.”

Lenora made an O with her mouth, released a pale cloud. “There isn't enough time to impress people,” she said.

“You wanted to impress her?”

“I think I did.” She held very still with a pained look of contemplation. “I think I loved her.”

“Of course you did.”

“No—not
of course
,” she said nastily. “You don't have to love your mother—a lot of people don't. Maybe
most
people don't. I thought I didn't . . . but I do.” Her gaze flew around the room and crashed into his. “I loved her,” she said. “And I don't love you.”

Hank heard static. He held the doorframe, his fingertips fused to the wood. He could stand there forever, he thought, become part of the wall.

“Why would you say that?” he managed.

“It's what I'm thinking.” She stabbed her cigarette out. “I thought you liked that.”

“Liked
what
?”

“That I say what I'm thinking.”

“I do—of course I do. But damn it . . . I wish you were thinking something else.”

“I might go to Paris.”

He stared.
I might chop your head off,
he thought.

“I just want to be alone.”

“In the most romantic city in the world—that's repulsive, Lenora.”

“Fine. It's repulsive.”

Hank shut his eyes, listened to the pounding chamber of his poisoned body. He heard his heart—he thought he did. It sounded sick and broken, like a tin clock at the bottom of a murky pond, ticking somehow, one whiskered fish floating by.

Lenora slammed her fist down on the table and his eyes popped open.

“I should have known she would
fall
,” she said.

“How could you have known?”

“You should've seen her. She looked so small in her nightgown. She had the skinny—almost
girlish
legs of a skeleton. And she kept asking to see her father,” Lenora said, transfixed. “It's so weird—dementia. Everyone you ever cared about comes back to life.”

“I know. It's like one big wish.” Hank walked toward her, not knowing what he would do when he got there.

Lenora started to cry.

He took her head in his hands and stroked it, which felt absurd, tending to the woman who didn't love him anymore. But his love for her—it was intact.

A block of light trembled on the table, faintly pink. A merciful light.

Hank looked down at the mess of papers before her. “What is all this?”

“The contest.” She sniffed. “The goddamn
stories
.”

“Did you pick someone?”

“No.” She wiped her nose. “People got less interesting the longer I looked.”

G
eorge Harrison was a Pisces,
she thought.
And I am a Capricorn.
She was in bed with her laptop balanced on her stomach. On the screen she read that some Pisces and Capricorn couples can make it work, but only if the Capricorn can learn to be less controlling.
I could be less controlling,
she thought, feeling certain.

But he was dead. It was like everything else. She was too late.
It's not the end of the world,
she imagined her father would say. Because her father always said this when someone was moping.
But it is,
she thought.
It's the end of the world.

All day she had been trying to write. She was so close but she was also lost. She was crawling in the dark. She minimized the astrology love-match screen, then read the last page she had written with building disappointment.

“It's just a collection of stories,” she said aloud. “You just have to finish the last story. Why is that so fucking hard?” Instantly she felt a slap of shame for talking to herself. She realized she was impersonating her father. It was a familiar shock that left her feeling hollow and used, like someone entered by a
parasite that hooks into the brain and rides the body around like a car.

She shut her eyes tightly, then opened them wide. It was obvious why the story was hard to finish. Because it was about her.
And I hate myself,
she thought. It was no secret. Everyone in her life was always saying, “You have to love yourself.” It made her hate them too.

She began scrolling through all the Beatles songs on her computer. Then she clicked on the most played song: “Here Comes the Sun,” and the same sweet little guitar came into the room, the same voice. Instantly it threw her into ecstasy.
Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here.

Her eyes filled with tears. She wondered how the same song continued to touch her this way.
It has all the same little fingers,
she thought, her eyes shimmering in the white glare of the screen. She sat up and a fat tear landed on the
R
key.

The Beatles wrote children's songs,
she thought, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
And George wrote the weird ones. That's why I like him,
she decided.
Cause I'm a weird little girl.

But she wasn't a little girl. She was twenty-eight, though it hardly seemed true. The thought shoved her into despair.
I'm not old yet,
she thought, frowning at the computer.
But I'm not young either.
She imagined two islands: one of babyhood, the other decrepitude. And she saw herself wading between them, seaweed flowing at her ankles.
I could drown this way,
she thought.
Between worlds
.

The song went on and the sweetness was crushing. She longed to fall into George Harrison's vulnerability—that yawning abyss. But she couldn't. She was too aware of how many seconds
were left in the song: forty-six. Now it was forty-two.
Why does everything have to end?
she thought and paused the song in anger.

She moved her laptop to the foot of the bed and scratched her stomach. She wore just underwear and a T-shirt with an alligator on it. Out of habit she reached for the old record cover leaning against the wall by the bed:
Rubber Soul
. She didn't have a record player but she wanted one. The record had appeared one day on a tan blanket in the street. It sat between some scuffed VHS tapes and an ugly brown leather jacket. It was four dollars. “Is two okay?” she had asked the bearded man but he shook his head. “Four.” So she gave him four.

Now she took the record into her hands and stared at it, moving her fingers over the four faces. When she reached George, she pulled her hand back. His cheek felt warm. Then she noticed he was blinking. He was staring at her.

Her heart raced. “It's you.”

“Where am I?” His eyes zapped around the small pink room. Papers everywhere. A green bureau crowded with Coke cans. Cigarette butts pressed out on the windowsill. He seemed to clock each thing.

“In my—well, this is my room.”

He stared a second. “Why am I here?”

“I don't know,” she said but it felt like a lie. He seemed to be there because she had prayed for him to be. Because there was a God—a
good
God—the kind who returned phone calls.

For a while they just stared at each other. Then, cocking his head, he said, “You're so nervous.”

“No I'm not,” she said and he went on staring. It made her squirm. “I mean, maybe I'm a
little
nervous,” she said. “About my book.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“I have to finish the last story. And I can't.”

“What's it about?”

“It's about me . . . and actually you're in it too.”

“So it should be easy.”

“But it isn't!”

“Maybe because you have to—”

“I know, I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes. “I have to
love
myself.”

George laughed. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

“I don't have to love myself?”

“No. You have to play.”

“What—like a guitar?”

“No. You've got to have fun, that's all.”

“Oh.”

“At some point play got banished,” he said in a rehearsed sort of way, like a monk had told him and he remembered. “Children play because they live in their own time. But most people when they get older, they
leave
their own time.”

“Where do they go?”

“Wherever the culture tells them to.”

“I don't understand.”

“Play gets replaced with a desire to be accepted, a desire for
identity
,” he sneered. “Everyone wants to
be
someone.”

“It's easy for you,” she said, feeling hurt. “You never had to be someone. You just
were
someone.”

“How would you know?” He sucked his teeth. “You don't know me. You think wanting to fuck me means you know me?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn't,” he said with disgust. “You're a fantasy addict.”

“I'm a writer,” she shot back.

“So write then. Tell the truth.”

She shook her head. “I can't. I don't know how.” She was holding back a sob. “I'm always gonna be like this.”

“Like what?”

“A monster.”

George stared, his dark eyes softening. “So write about that.”

The walls were glowing—pinker suddenly—like a sunset in the womb.

“What if no one cares?” she said. She couldn't imagine anything worse.

“Don't think so much about the future.”

“Why the hell not?”

“
Because
,” he said carefully, “it doesn't belong to you.”

“Okay,” she said. She was starting to feel a little angry. She pulled a cigarette from the pack on her side table and lit up. “So what
does
belong to me? Nothing? I've got nothing, right?”

“No. Not nothing. Come on. Not nothing.”

“What then?” she said, smoke charging from her nostrils.

“You have this,” he said. “
Today.
Not tomorrow.”

She ashed onto the floor. “I'm not stupid.”

“I know that,” he said and a train of red hearts floated by. She touched one and it laughed in transit, then vanished.

“But am I crazy?” she asked.

“Yes,” he grinned. Then all around the room she saw it towering in giant black letters, the word: YES. YES.
YES.

She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled, then felt her cheeks warm up and wanted badly to be kissed.

“Give me a puff, will you?” he said and she held the cigarette
to his lips. He took a long suck, then blew a skinny cloud. “Again,” he said and she returned the cigarette to his mouth. He seemed to take all the time in the world inhaling. It felt religious. Then smoke poured from his mouth in a slow, sensual manner, crawling up through the air like a herd of lazy white lizards.

“Alright,” he said and she dropped the cigarette in an old glass of water by the bed. Hearing it sizzle, she said, “I'm just a slow writer.”

“Who needs to play,” he smirked.

“What I need is quiet.” She felt a speech gathering in her thoughts and contained it. “I'm not gonna talk about my process,” she said, shaking her head. “It's too boring. I mean, I
hate
when writers talk about their process. They always look so proud of what they're saying, like it's the frosting on the cake.”

“But it's the shit on the shoe.”

“Right!” she exclaimed, then stared into his dark grin. It was a face both warlike and unprotected, which was exactly what she wanted from a man: something open and shut.

“Why am I in the story?” he asked.

“I don't know. Cause I can't stop thinking about you.” She blinked thoughtfully. “If I'm gonna write about myself, I have to write about you. You're in my head.” She stared hard at him. He didn't seem to mind.
He must be used to it,
she thought, which felt a little sad. Like he was a very special monkey.

“In the story you're dying of cancer and you've kind of accepted it,” she explained. “You keep saying how everyone turns to dust and stuff like that. But I'm going nuts. I don't want you to die. I'm sitting by your hospital bed and I keep saying
it isn't fair, it isn't fair
.”

“What isn't fair?”

“That you're dying!” She stared at him, timid suddenly. “I mean, that you
died
. How could that be fair? All sorts of schmucks live to be a hundred . . . so they know something you'll never know.”

George was quiet. A soft look of violation passed over his face.

The dead are innocent,
she thought, feeling guilty. But she couldn't stop herself. “I just think I would've known how to touch you.”

“You and every other girl in the world.”

“Yeah well, every other girl is wrong. Every girl but me.” She sat there staring and felt like a baby, then a fool, then a crazy person. “You're a creature of another time . . . a time I'd like to crawl into.” She began to cry. “I can't be young now. I don't know how. But I could've been young then.”

He just stared. Maybe he didn't agree that the sixties would've embraced her. She herself couldn't be entirely sure. But it was a feeling and it burned, the feeling of aloneness in her own time.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

“I don't know,” he said. “Twenty?”

“Actually I'm twenty-eight,” she beamed.

“No,”
he said, grinning in his handsome, ghoulish way. “Really?”

“Really,” she said seriously because it was a serious thing. “Twenty-
eight
.”

“Well,” he said, “you're doing an honor to your decade.” Then he leaned out of the record cover as if it were a car window and kissed her on the mouth.

She heard saxophones and seagulls, a hammer hitting a nail. Everything in the world; everything holy and good. It was a wet, biting kiss and it stirred the glittering feeling in her
crotch. Soon every cell in her body was glittering too. She hoped it would go on and on and on and somehow lead to sex. But his lips released her and he sank back into the record cover.

The spit he left on her tongue tasted like black tea and tobacco. There was a third element also, one that began quietly, but soon it was all she could taste. It was the surprising flavor of his flesh itself. Smiling, she thought,
No animal tastes alike
.

“God,” she said, her eyes immense. “I like you so much. I might even love you.”

“Why?” he asked, staring in his deadpan way.

Then a number rose in his eyes: 2,898,787,775. It was the number of women who loved him and it blazed a sickly yellow.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said quickly. “I didn't think you'd ask
why
.”

“Come on. Tell me.”

“I like your visions. They make me wet. ‘I Me Mine'—that song makes me
wet
. I wish you weren't George Harrison. I wish you were . . .” She touched the bone of his cheek. “I wish you were anyone.”

“Anyone?”

“I wish you just like, worked at a deli.”

“No.” He moved his face from her hand. “You wouldn't want me then.”

“Oh but I would! I would see you and I would just
know
you were wonderful. I would try to seduce you.”

“What would you do?”

“I would walk up to the counter.”

“And then?”

“You would say hello.”

“And then?”

“I would say hello. I would just stand there.”

“Enticing.”

“No there's more.”

“I'm listening.”

“I would buy you a pickle.”

He laughed.

“Or whatever you wanted. It would be like when someone at a bar buys the bartender a drink.”

She was getting excited and the air knew it. God knew it. Even the little brown spiders in the walls knew and they didn't scare her. Not now, not tonight.

“Then I would invite you over,” she continued. “I would bring you to this room and we would crawl onto the bed. I would kiss you but like where no one else has ever kissed you.”

“Where?”

“Your eyelids.” She smiled. “Your ass.”

“Lots of people have kissed my ass,” he smirked.

“No I mean
really
kiss your ass. Like with my mouth.”

“I know what you meant.”

“Well I would do it differently,” she smiled. “And I would get completely naked. I would even take off my earrings and like if I was wearing lipstick I would rub it off with a Kleenex. Then I would lie on my back and I would open my vagina with my fingers,” she said seriously. “And in there you would find the whole universe.”