She just doesn't learn.
It doesn't matter how many times he spits out all those words at her. It doesn't matter how many times he has smiles like he always does, unzipping his teeth like a rapist unzipping his fly, and it doesn't matter how many times her mascara bleeds or how many times she has to drink herself to sleep so she can forget.
Because she has an addiction.
She is addicted to the same words that make her insides bleed so bad, except bunched up in his hands and disguised like posies. Dressed up – costumed – like love and attention when all he really wants is sex and all she really wants is a vase to put the blossoms in.
I know.
I can see.
And now he's back again.
I see him with his arm slung around her waist and jiggling the doorknob to his apartment like a pin ball lever and laughing as if nothing happened yesterday. Nothing at all. The puddles in the parking lot are just oil spills, not tears out of Heather's eyes,
dripdripdrip
like a leak in the roof that no one has ever bothered to fix.
She is laughing too, I guess. But it's not real. It's all hollow and automated like electronic female voices, cooler than a slaughterhouse meat-locker. I can tell that it wants to be real. I can tell that she desperately hopes that this time the bunches of posies he's handing to her aren't going to wither at the slightest touch.
She is an ash tray.
His smooth talk – crooked, bent Marlboro's – is being stamped out on her heart.
As they disappear inside, I know that I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I just turn away, pray a little, and hope that tomorrow morning she doesn't show up at school with a bruise on her face like warpaint and the lights in her eyes turned down real dim. I have never trusted Amir's hands.
They travel.
Like salesmen with dusty suitcases and beat-up shoes.
I drop a penny in Heather's parking lot puddles, for good luck, as I walk up the steps and push open the door. He's started already. They are little earthquake epicenters, rattling the walls. With my hat in my hands and my head bowed, I wait in the hallway.
I wait for her to scream.
What will I say, I wonder, if she actually does?
What will I do?
Probably stumble in like a little boy pushed into the girl's bathroom, point my finger at that bastard (his chest all naked and puffing in and out), and open my mouth, letting a bunch of nonsense words stutter out. He'll laugh and tell me to close the door behind me when I leave.
You like this peepshow, Charlie-boy?
You wanna watch?
I'll show you how to treat a woman real good.
The curtains at the end of the hallway, yellowed and dirty, but with blue cross-stitched flowers sewn into the hem, dirty dance with each other as wind leaks in. A grunt from Amir's room. And a gasp: from a girl dressed up all pretty for a date to a slasher flick, hiding her face in the chest of her escort because the leading actress just got cut up into little pieces by the monster.
The pictures on Amir's walls are rattling against the wall too, like a janitor's key ring.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
I can barely stand it.
And then, muffled, is Heather's voice through the walls,
“Amir, Amir, you're...hurting me! Get off, get off!”
My heart flutters a little, like a red scarf around the neck of a woman in a convertible. And my stomach is falling, falling, falling and I don't know what I'll do if he doesn't stop, if he isn't gentler.
Who will kill who first, I wonder, when I break down the door?
Can I even break down the door?
“Amir!”
“C'mon baby!”
“Stop it! I'm finished! Godssakes, you bastard, I'm done!”
And yet, the walls are still rattling, slamming like screen doors. I close my eyes and bite my lip. Every tendon, every stingy muscle is tensed up, twisted up and he's still going and she's still asking and I'm still waiting. I wonder what the landlord is thinking right now. Those kids and their crazy bass-pumped music.
“Stop, stop, stop!”
I hear her slap him.
I think I can hear him breathing real heavy, in and out, nostrils flaring, eyes dilating until they're as small as those itty-bitty letters on the alphabet wall-chart of an eye-doctor. All his anger is building up inside of him, making the wallpaper in the hallway crackle with static electricity and shrivel up a little.
And he hits her back.
I know, because the sound his hand makes against her face is something delicate and ornate with a bunch of moving parts shattering against concrete.
My chest tears.
I throw all the weight I got into the door.
And it cracks.
Splinters.
Breaks.
And I trip into the room yelling and Amir and Heather both look at me like I'm some kind of Negro in a White's only establishment. He's standing over her with his hand raised and she's on the floor, all crumpled up like a pop can smashed against someone's forehead. His chest is a bagpipe. In and out in and out and his lips model silent words.
Heather is shivering.
I want so much to hold her and make her warm again, like an electric blanket.
Finally Amir says, “What the hell are you doin' here, kid?”
“Don't touch her,” I whisper. The words clank and squeak from between my lips like wind-up tin soldiers.
“What are you – ?Just turn around, for God's sakes! Turn around and close the door behind you and forget that you ever saw anything!”
“Get away from her.”
“You got 'till three!” he screams.
“I'll fight,” I say in a voice that is barely audible.
Amir is pulling up his pants, his mouth frothing a little like one of those baking soda and vinegar volcano science projects and he snatches a candlestick from a shelf. He steps over Heather and says, “One.”
I move back a little.
I wish desperately still that I had the gun from the pawn shop and that I hadn't given it to whoever fishes the dead bodies out of the river. I wish I had it in front of me right now – a lion tamer's chair – and I had confidence and strength and, and –
Stupid.
What was I thinking?
Heather is rolled up into a ball and you can almost see through her rice paper skin onto the floorboards underneath her, so that every single one of her bones is made visible; sad, hollow wind-chime rods.
“Two!” Amir bellows and the picture frames rattle on the wall.
And then I see the bruises on her back and her cheek and I want Amir to suffer so bad. I want him to feel every dust mote of pain that has pricked the nerve endings of the human race since the beginnings of time. All my thoughts are gone again, killed in a massive genocide, and Amir is alone in my head. Frail and small, like a night light. I want to kill him in so many ways! I want to bleed him out until all that's left of him is a shriveled up, dried up husk.
His lips don't have a chance to give birth to three.
Thrumming and jumping and screaming on the inside, I throw myself into him, catching him around the stomach (cool and hard, like a beer can nestled in snow) and shove him against the wall. He gasps a little and drops the candlestick and I knee him in the groin.
Heather is screaming at us.
Her words are meshed together and indistinguishable like scrawled suicide notes.
Amir freezes up, his face cracks a little, and he drops to the floor. This time, I swing at his face with my fist. His teeth grind like stalled cars caught in the grille of a train and spit and blood are ejected from his mouth and get all over my knuckles. Which are split. Right down the middle and the bone is showing.
Everything has been dyed red.
Like a dark room where they keep developing pictures.
And I'm only half aware of myself grabbing the candlestick and beating his head and chest. He's screaming, Heather is screaming, I'm screaming. The whole world screeches. And soon the landlord comes down (all frail and translucent, like an unborn fetus with stubbly fingers and an over sized head) and Russian words spill into the mix. And he sees us squirming on the ground and sees all the pain shoved into the room, piled into the room.
Blood is all over the place.
Amir stops screaming soon.
His head is a deflated Macy's day parade balloon.
I start to laugh because I can't feel my toes or my fingers or my face and that's the weirdest sensation ever. I laugh even harder when a cop car serenades outside the window. But my laughing stops eventually. The laughing stops when I see:
my hands,
my hate,
my success,
and Heather's face.
I have never seen so much deadness in my life, even in the hospital where Death himself walked up and down the hallways like a flower girl up and down a wedding aisle.
I have never seen so much fear.
Everything is quiet now, listening.
The cops' hands are strong. And they're not stained like mine are. I don't think that even a lifetime of hand-washing will take Amir's blood out of my pores, out of the lines in my palm, out from under my fingernails. It'll be second hand smoke in my clothes and my hair and my breath.
The curtains in the hallway – the ones with the blue cross-stitched flowers – wave hello.
<!>
-August 30th-
She ran.
Ran as fast as she possibly can, with her child in her arms, and her face drawn up tight, like the strings of a corset, while the sky humming the musical scale.
Do (a deer, a female deer).
Ra (a drop of golden sun).
Mi (a name I call myself).
Charlie knew that the evil men and cancer and nuclear winter were filling up the sky and spooking his mother and he knew that they had to get to the bomb shelter as fast as possible. He knew that the airplanes in the sky – black things, angry things, like black women sitting on the city bus and not budging an inch when the driver tells her to get up, woman, can't you see that there's a man here (with ivory skin) who needs a place to sit?
The whole city was filling up with fear.
Live wires, hot-wiring the oxygen.
Charlie could see the bunker, Mother could see the bunker and she put on an extra burst of speed (even with all that cigarette smoke hanging around her lungs) and she whispered frantically in Charlie's ears, “Don't let go, hon. Don't let go. We're almost there. Almost, almost.”
Fa (a long way to run).
Her shoes crunched in the gravel and she threw her whole body against the door of the bomb shelter and tried the latch and slapped her open palm against the metal until she started to bleed. All she had was a jacket. That's all she had to protect herself, as thin and as papery as insect exoskeletons.
The sky began to whistle and whir and hum to life.
Mother clutched the back of Charlie's head, pushed his face deep inside her shoulder (nicotine brushed his nose like fake eyelashes; long and lustrous) and somewhere in the heart of the city a baby, itty-bitty, right out of the birth canal, starts to cry.
The world is cracked open, like a wedding ring box with a diamond nestled inside that sparkles and shines and glitters the same way all the souls in Chicago do, being colored in and outside the lines with flames.
God
breathes.
<END BOOK I>
