Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 14

Bad night?” Sonia asks. There is a hard edge to her voice. I kept her up, I bet.

“Why?”

“You were moaning.”

“I dreamt about my father. I kept conflating him with the refugee.”

“Was he crazy too?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes he was very crazy.”

“The refugee is nuts all the time,” Sonia says, looking for her cigarettes. “They are trying to track down the husband so they can sign her away into a mental hospital.”

“They shouldn’t put her away,” I say.

“Why shouldn’t they?”

I can’t tell her.

“Hello?” Sonia raises her brow. “She shits herself every five minutes.”

“The mind,” I say, “can stretch itself out pretty far and still snap back.”

She’s now ignoring me.

“Why do I talk to you? You are a child, a brat who knows nothing.”

“I am not a child,” she screams, turning on me. “I know about war. There’s a man on my very street. No arm. Shot off in some stupid war. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to grab my ass every fucking time I walk by.”

I should laugh, the little bitch. But I don’t. I want to see if it’s even possible to make her feel contrite. “I’d be careful,” I say. “Everyone goes mad at some point. The brain is the enemy. It can turn on you in a flash. Remember how you felt after you escaped that truck driver? What if that fear just stayed? The dark woods you found yourself in, the sight of your ripped blouse, the feel of that fucker’s hand on the back of your neck as he tried to make you suck his dick. No other passing traffic, no lights, nothing, just the sound of your heart, and as you opened your eyes even wider, trying desperately to see in the pitch dark, your heart was doing some awfully weird shit. Like stopping. How fucking scared were you? Now what if that night of feeling completely alone, of not being able to rein in your crazy thoughts stretched into a hundred, or a thousand nights? You’d be shitting yourself too. In fact, it’s amazing that we all aren’t shitting ourselves all the time, because what you felt that night is the truth. The brain’s job—and believe me, it often fails—is to create enough static so we aren’t constantly faced with that truth. Nobody, in their right mind, could cope with that.”

“What are you saying? The refugee’s brain knows only the truth?”

“Maybe.”

“How the fuck do you know? Are you a doctor?”

“No, but it makes sense.”

“What image do you think is stuck in her brain?” she asks, giving me a sly look.

“What do you think?”

“How about seeing, for the first time, the angry purple of her husband’s dick as it popped out of his underwear.”

“How about looking over your shoulder and seeing your entire country walking to a refugee camp?”

Sonia rolls her eyes. “How about seeing his purple tongue smeared with sausage and beer coming at you for a honeymoon kiss.”

“What’s with the color purple? Besides,” I say, “those are your images. The refugee isn’t a sex-crazed schoolgirl like yourself.”

She is staring at me.

“I wish you had a cast,” Sonia says, stubbing out her cigarette and coming to stand over my leg and the Erector set that inspires no poetry, not like the one I wore after breaking my leg as a kid, the plaster of paris after the fireball heat had cooled and upon which no one could resist etching a ditty or two. “Give me a pill,” a nurse once wrote to honor all I ever asked of her. I painted the whole thing red the night before it was to be sawed off, erased the jumble of graffiti for good. “Then I could write something. These rods, they may be better for you, but they make me want to throw up.”

“What would you have written?” I ask.

“I would have written, ‘Girls with big ears shouldn’t call other girls sex-crazed.’”

“I meant it as a compliment.”

“Shhhh!” Sonia has her finger to her lips and her head is cocked. It’s not possible that she is hearing something before me.

“What?”

“Something has happened,” she whispers, darting out the door.