Читать книгу Come Up and See Me Sometime - Erika Krouse - Страница 9

He who hesitates is last.

—Mae West

Sometimes he made me tell people how we met, which I hated. He’d make me tell the story in a bar, where you’re supposed to be funny, with a punch line. Close to the end, I took him aside and said, “Cliff, our relationship has no punch line,” and he said, “Yet.” So I told the fucking story, and I’ll tell it now that the story’s over.

I was new to Santa Fe, looking for a job and friends. I had moved there partly because it was beautiful, and partly because I had lived in Iowa my whole life. Santa Fe had cacti, yet it also had snow. It had a bunch of interesting people who wore silk scarves around their necks during heat waves and hiked in cowboy boots. I wanted to know what made people do things like that. I was almost twenty-five.

It’s hard to meet people in Santa Fe because everyone just assumes you’re a tourist and doesn’t waste time on you. So I mostly took walks alone, or drove around alone, or ate mushy chile rellenos alone in a restaurant called Dave’s Not Here. They named it Dave’s Not Here because they were sick of people asking for him, Dave. Nobody knows where he is, or, by now, who he is.

One evening in the early fall I was driving down St. Michael’s Drive when this man stepped backwards off the median, right in front of my car. I stood on the brakes, but I knew instantly that there was no way, that it was too late. His head turned and our eyes caught through the windshield. My mouth opened. Before the car slammed into his body, he jumped into the air. A football dropped from above and nested itself firmly in his arms before he disappeared.

He was gone. I hit a man, I thought, and sent him to Heaven. I don’t believe in Heaven. The car was still skidding forward.

Then the most tremendous thud dented in the car roof, right above my head. I screamed. The car stopped.

Everything was very quiet. I looked up at the roof. I realized that I would have to get out and look at it, the corpse on the roof of my car. I would have to look at the unfamiliar face of a man I had killed. For a second, I wondered how I could die, kill myself, without ever opening the car door.

There was movement above. A sneaker appeared in front. It gingerly reached down the windshield. It snaked around. It jiggled the windshield wiper. Then the whole body slid down onto the hood in a blue blur.

The man was now standing on the ground, feeling his body and neck with one hand. The football was still in the other hand. He looked at it, then dropped it on the pavement. He walked around the car, toward me, and tapped on the window. He asked, “Can you open the window?” He asked, “Are you okay, ma’am?” Then, “Can you answer me?” Other people started running up and pulling out their cell phones.

The man finally opened my door himself. Dust blew into the car and I squinted through it at him. His blue eyes were earnest. “Ma’am? I’m okay. Are you okay?”

I reached for him. He stepped forward to help me. “Ma’am?” I kept reaching past his outstretched arms. My fingers touched the rough fabric of his clothes and I put my hands underneath them, on his skin. I stroked his entire body—his legs, chest, arms, hips, groin, with a kind of wonder at the way a body can just be, or not be. He didn’t know what to say. Before I fainted, I touched his face once, twice, three times as if it were the holiest thing I had ever seen.

THAT DAY, after I almost killed Cliff, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. I followed him home. Really, by foot. He kept turning around, saying, “I’m fine.” After a while, he let me walk with him. He tried to get me to tell him my name, my job, all that. I said, “I’m worried about your head. Don’t fall asleep,” and he asked, “Ever?”

“Listen, I’m feeling just fine,” Cliff said once we walked up to his apartment door. “I just have some bruises on my legs. Don’t worry. Let it go.”

“I can’t. You must be hurt. I hit you with a whole car.”

“I have to do some work now.” He unlocked his door and stood with his hand on the knob.

“Can I watch you?”

Cliff sighed through his nose.

“I don’t really know anyone else in town,” I said.

He waved me inside. While he got me a glass of water, I looked around. I noticed the giant photograph of Karl Marx hanging over the kitchen table, and the bumper sticker over his desk: “Jesus, protect me from your followers.” His TV was sitting inside a kiva fireplace in the corner. There was a framed photograph of Ho Chi Minh next to a scrawled picture in magic marker of a big green monster wearing an orange sweatshirt. Written above the googly eyes and jagged head was the word “Gog.”

“My niece,” Cliff said. “I don’t know what that means, Gog.”

He sat down at his desk. The chair squeaked. I sat on the floor and studied him. He had deep blue eyes and short, light brown hair. Maybe in his early thirties.

“I really have to finish this chapter.” He held a piece of paper in his hand.

“What do you do?”

“I’m an economist. I’m working on a book.”

“What’s it about?”

“The economy. Doom.” I guess I didn’t have any expression on my face, because he threw his hands up and turned to his desk.

I watched him work. Every now and then he looked up and said, softly, “Please please leave.”

So I went home. But I came back.

THIS STORY is about drugs. I’m telling you now because I was surprised, too. But there’s more that you need to know.

Cliff thrilled me. He knew words like “anarcho-syndicalism.” He stood in front of the television set during the evening news and said, “Fuck,” whenever scenes of genocide or military strife flashed on the screen. I stared at him. This was real to him. I looked back at the images and tried to stretch my imagination so that it was real for me, too, all the rape and starvation and guns.

Cliff hunted deer every year, up north near Cimarron. He used every part of the dead deer, even tanning the hide himself. He used the deer brain to do it by mashing it up with a bunch of salt. It’s called a “brain tan.” He told me that every mammal on the planet magically has just enough brains to tan its own hide.

Once we went up to Ojo Caliente to jump in their hot springs. Afterwards, at the package store, Cliff broke out in fluent Spanish. I stared with my mouth open. He and the shopkeeper talked for so long, I just sat in the dust and waited until they were done. The whole ride home, Cliff kept accidentally slipping into Spanish until he stopped talking at all.

In a bar, while Cliff’s friends were playing pool one night, he told me that he had grown up in Salt Lake City, as a Mormon. “I grew up believing that when you die, you get your own planet.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Whatever you want. You’re god.”

“Isn’t it lonely?”

“You choose your neighbors by marrying them.” Cliff raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“Do women get planets?”

“Nope. Sorry. They go to their husband’s planet.”

Cliff told me that in the Main Temple in Salt Lake City, they have an office ready for Jesus, complete with a desk, separate phone lines, pens and paper. “Mormonism is all about real estate,” he said.

“What was it like for you, growing up like that?”

“When you figure out that no deity is keeping tabs on how often you brush your teeth, it’s a little depressing. I mean, what’s the point?”

“Cavities.”

“I mean, to everything? Existence?” Cliff stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Nothing. No point.”

I grew up with no religion, so I don’t have these existential crises, although I respect them in others. I never thought that I was living for the sake of a god. I was just a human being. So it came to be its own point. Life.

WE HAD been dating for months and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have sex with me. There were many things I didn’t understand. Sometimes I lay on his bed while he wrote or read. I rolled onto my side.

“Cliff?”

“Honey?”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing, that’s all right, baby.”

“What do boys want?”

“Girls.”

“That’s it?”

“Some boys want other boys.”

“What do you want?” I asked. “I mean, what do you want?”

“Socialism.”

“What do you want?”

And on. Me naked, him reading something, with a cigarette between his teeth.

So I was stupid to have been surprised when I opened the door to his bedroom and found him with a needle in his arm.

We stared at each other for a second. He looked down and pulled the needle out.

“So,” I asked clearly, “are you addicted, or just a dick?”

He turned around and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a bag of needles, razor blades, a scale, a mirror, a bag with a thin layer of white dust, and a small plastic container with a chewing-gum-sized wad of black, sticky stuff. He spread it all on the bed.

I picked up the white bag and cocked my head to one side.

“Cocaine,” Cliff said.

I touched the plastic container with one finger. “So, this is heroin.”

He opened the container, turned it upside down and then smacked it against the mirror until the wad fell out. I looked at it and its reflection.

“How often do you do this?”

“Once a week. Once a week for three days. Or four. Not so much the rest of the week.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Cliff touched my face.

I tapped the mirror with the heroin on it. “How much of this stuff does it take to kill you?”

Cliff picked up a razor blade and nicked off a small dab. It was the size of a sunflower seed, smaller, even. I looked at the rest of the heroin lying on the mirror. I had a sudden urge to put the whole gob in my mouth and swallow it.

“Give me some,” I said. I was just testing him, to see what he would do, I think.

“No.” He put his arm around me. I let him pull me down to the floor and kiss me. It was unreal. I thought about the Mormons and their planets.

I touched that place inside his arms, the small red dot. I was strangely moved by this part of him, so soft, so violated. He kissed me again. Before he closed his eyes, I saw myself curving away in their darkness, and wanted to go to that place where he was.

All that night, I stayed awake and watched over him. He whimpered and reached out for me every now and then. He looked so soft in sleep, fingers curled under his chin. I tried to fit everything together in my head.

I couldn’t help it. I know it’s very bad. But as I watched him sleep, I felt a strange kind of new respect taking shape. This was a man who sought out a controlled substance and injected himself on a daily basis. Say what you will, but that takes initiative.

I RENTED a movie called Drugs and You. We watched it together in Cliff’s apartment. It talked about heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, crack, smack, heart attacks, insomniacs … I could rap the whole thing. Cliff barely listened. He caressed my hand.

“What you need,” he said midway through the rehab stuff, “is a pet. I’m going to buy you a hamster.”

“No.”

“Everyone needs an animal to love.”

“Who says?”

“Nietzsche.”

“But I’ve got you. You’re a fucking animal.” I gave him a raunchy smile, even though it wasn’t true. We barely ever had sex.

“You need something else,” Cliff said.

We watched the movie until Cliff got up and disappeared into his room. In a few minutes, I followed him. He was cooking up. This is what my life had become—I knew phrases like “cooking up.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Why? What did you expect, honey?” He put the needle down. “Listen. This is my life. I don’t want to change. On the other hand, I love you. You can do whatever you want with that information.”

“Well, tiger, don’t get all emotional on me.”

He stared at me for a minute. “Once I got so emotional about you, I threw up.”

“You threw up over me?”

He brought home a parakeet and named it Fido. He tried to get it to talk, and to sit on our fingers. But whenever Cliff opened the cage door, Fido flew at me, biting. He latched onto my earlobe, or the skin of my neck. He drew blood. I grabbed at Fido and stuffed him back in his cage each time.

“You taste like chicken,” I told him through the bars.

Cliff gave up and kept him inside the cage while I was there. I always walked right over to the cage in the corner whenever I came over. Fido and I tried to stare each other down through the bars, his little round eye pitted against my own.

“I might leave you,” I told Cliff. But I didn’t leave him, and I didn’t leave him.

IT WAS OUR anniversary, three months. We were going to go to dinner at La Cocina, and then have sex. We had to plan sex in advance, to make sure that it fell on a sober day—my rules. Mostly because there was no other way to do it.

I showed up at Cliff’s apartment but he was late, so I let myself in as usual. I mooned around, in love. I touched things—his calculator, his shirts.

By the time he opened his door, I was already there to greet him. He grabbed me around my waist and held me. I put my arms around him. He said into the air above my head, “I shot up tonight.” As his mouth opened to say these words, I felt something drop into my hair. I touched it. It was his gum.

“Oh no, I got gum in your hair. I got …” Cliff was distraught, groping the top of my head.

I stepped away and stared at him.

I went into his bathroom and grabbed the edges of the sink. I looked in the mirror. The face that looked back was so ordinary, not the kind of face that can change the world or even the sheets. Cliff soon appeared in the door with a jar of peanut butter.

“I heard that if you put peanut butter on it—” He started painting my hair with peanut butter.

“Forget the hair.” I whirled at him. “Forget it.” I picked up his nail scissors and cut out the whole wad of hair, gum and peanut butter. I threw it at him.

“I can’t live with an addict. I don’t want to come home and find you dead in the lotus position.”

“We’re not living together.”

“This is already a very unhealthy relationship,” I told him.

He looked slightly relieved.

“I mean, it was,” I said. “I’m out.” I spread my hands wide, fingers stretched open.

Cliff looked down immediately. Then he went to the bedroom. After a second, I followed him. He opened the drawer with all the drugs and paraphernalia. I got suddenly scared, thinking about that little dab of heroin. I started grabbing at his arms, pulling them away from the needles and things. He pushed me away, gathered everything up, and left the room.

I stood in the hallway and listened to the sounds of a toilet flushing, a hammer against metal, plastic bags rustling, then the door slamming. I went back into his bedroom and lay down on his bed, holding my forehead.

I live like a bug, I thought. Crawling around, wondering when I’m going to get squashed. This relationship is a bug.

In a few minutes, he was back in the bedroom before the front door had fallen shut. “You won. It’s gone,” he said. “All of it.”

I sat up.

“Poof,” he said.

AT FIRST there was an element of now what? In fact, I asked Cliff. “Now what?”

“Well, what did you do with other boyfriends?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

But we tried stuff. I read some trashy novels and got ideas. There’s always the section of the book after he almost loses her the first time and then gets her back, and they do things during those times. Go to dinner, go dancing. Talk about their family lives. So these were the things that Cliff and I did. We talked about the world. We talked about each other. We saw a counselor who once put her hand on Cliff’s knee during a session. We found another counselor and then decided that things were pretty good, so I moved in.

We mixed his books (War and Strife, Strife and Socialism, Socialism and Revolution) with mine (Wuthering Heights, Lolita, National Velvet). We took the TV set out of the fireplace and built fires out of pinion branches. We made homemade tamales. We watched Santa Fe’s lava sunsets, when the clouds lurk around the east edge of town like ghosts afraid of fire.

But no matter, he shot up again, of course. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. I had just come home from grocery shopping. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t have to—the way he passed his hand over my face before saying anything, the way his facial expressions appeared one second too late, as if he were following cue cards. I looked up at his face and started to cry.

I wondered how long he’d been doing this. Months? I had long ago stopped checking the insides of his elbows while he slept. Or he could have been smoking it. It didn’t matter—it didn’t matter. I grabbed his shirt and cried into it, while he just stood there, arms at his sides.

“I don’t know how to save you,” I said and wiped my nose on his shirt.