Читать книгу No One Belongs Here More Than You - Миранда Джулай - Страница 8

I am not the kind of person who is interested in Britain’s royal family. I’ve visited computer chat rooms full of this type of person, and they are people with small worlds, they don’t consider the long term, they aren’t concerned about the home front; they are too busy thinking about the royal family of another country. The royal clothes, the royal gossip, the royal sad times, especially the sad times, of this one family. I was only interested in the boy. The older one. At one time I didn’t even know his name. If someone had shown me a picture, I might have guessed who he was, but not his name, not his weight or his hobbies or the names of the girls who attended that co-ed university of his. If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren’s children would get to him. But they wouldn’t know what to do; they wouldn’t know how to hold him. And he would be dead; he would be replaced by his great-grandson’s beautiful strapping son. His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness groups. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.

All my life I have had the same dream. It’s what they call reoccurring; it always unfolds to the same conclusion. Except for on October 9, 2002. The dream began as it always does, in a low-ceilinged land where everyone is forced to crawl around on hands and knees. But this time I realized that everyone around me was having sex, it was a consequence of living horizontally. I was furious and tried to pry the couples apart with my hands, but they were stuck together like mating beetles. Then, suddenly, I saw him. Will. In the dream I recognized he was a celebrity, but I didn’t know which one. I felt very embarrassed because I knew he was used to being around cute young girls and he had probably never seen anyone who looked like me before. But gradually I realized he had lifted up the back of my skirt and was nuzzling his face between my buns. He was doing this because he loved me. It was a kind of loving I had never known was possible. And then I woke up. That’s how I used to end all my stories in school: And then I woke up! But that wasn’t the end, because as I opened my eyes, a car drove by outside and it was blaring music, which usually I hate and actually I think it should be illegal, but this song was so beautiful—it went like this: “All I need is a miracle, all I need is you.” Which exactly matched the feeling I was having from the dream. I got out of bed and, as if I needed more evidence, I opened The Sacramento Bee, and there, in the World News section, was an article about Prince Charles’s visit to a housing estate in Glasgow, a trip he took with his son, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis. There was a picture. He looked just as he had when nuzzling my buns, the same lovely blond confidence, the same nose.

I typed “royal family” into a dream-interpretation website, but they didn’t have that in their database, so then I typed “butt” and hit “interpret,” and this came back: To see your buttocks in your dream represents your instincts and urges. It also said: To dream that your buttocks are misshapen suggests undeveloped or wounded aspects of your psyche. But my butt was shaped all right, so that let me know my psyche was developed, and the first part told me to trust my instincts, to trust my butt, the butt that trusted him.

That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. I have a long skirt like the one he lifted, and I wore it with a new sexual feeling. I swayed in to work; I glided around the staff kitchen. My sister calls these skirts “dirndls.” She means this in a derogatory way. In the afternoon she came by my office at QuakeKare to use the Xerox machine. She seemed almost surprised to see me there, as if we had bumped into each other at Kinko’s. QuakeKare’s mandate is to teach preparedness and support quake victims around the world. My sister likes to joke that she’s practically a quake victim, because her house is such a mess.

What do you call that exactly, a dirndl? she said.

It’s a skirt. You know it’s a skirt.

But doesn’t it seem strange that the well-tailored, flattering piece of clothing that I’m wearing is also called a skirt? Shouldn’t there be a distinction?

Not everyone thinks shorter is more arousing.

Arousing? Did you just say “arousing”? Were we talking about arousal? Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that word. Say it again.

What? Arousing.

Don’t say it! It’s too much, it’s like you said “fuck” or something.

Well, I didn’t.

No. Do you think you might never fuck again? When you said Carl left you, that was the first thing that came into my mind: She will never fuck again.

Why are you like this?

What? Should I be all buttoned up, like you? Hush-hush? Is that healthier?

I’m not that buttoned up.

Well, I would love to go out on that limb with you, but I’m going to need some evidence of this unbuttonedness.

I have a lover!

But I did not say this, I did not say I am loved, I am a person worth loving, I am not dirty anywhere, ask Prince William. That night I made a list of ways to meet him in reality:

Go to his school to give a lecture on earthquake

safety.

Go to the bars near his school and wait for him.

They were not mutually exclusive; they were both reasonable ways to get to know someone. People meet in bars every day, and they often have sex with people they meet in bars. My sister does this all the time, or she did when she was in college. Afterward she would call and tell me every detail of her night, not because we are close—we are not. It is because there is something wrong with her. I would almost call what she does sexual abuse, but she’s my younger sister, so there must be another word for it. She’s over the top. That’s all I can say about her. If the top is here, where I am, she’s over it, hovering over me, naked.

The next morning I woke up at six and began walking. I knew I’d never be thin, but I decided to work toward an allover firmness that would feel okay if he touched me in the dark. After I lost ten pounds, I would be ready to join a gym; until then I would just walk and walk and walk. As I moved through the neighborhood, I re-ignited the dream, reaching such a pitch of clarity that I felt I might see him around the next corner. Upon seeing him, I would put my head under his shirt and stay there forever. I could see sunlight streaming through the stripes of his rugby pullover; my world was small and smelled like man. In this way I was blinded and did not see the woman until she stepped right in front of me. She was wearing a yellow bathrobe.

Shit. Did you see a little brown dog run that way? Potato!

No.

Are you sure? Potato! He must have just run out. Potato!

I wasn’t paying attention.

Well, you would have seen him. Shit. Potato!

Sorry.

Jesus. Well, if you see him, grab him and bring him back over here. He’s a little brown dog, his name is Potato. Potato!

Okay.

I walked on. It was time to concentrate on meeting him; plans 1 and 2. I’ve gone to other schools and discussed earthquake safety, so it wouldn’t be the first time. There’s a school in the neighborhood, Buckman Elementary, and every year they invite the firemen in to explain how to Stop, Drop, and Roll, and later in the day I come in and talk about earthquake safety. Sadly, there is very little you can do. You can stop, you can drop, you can jump up in the air and flap your arms, but if it’s the Big One, you’re better off just praying. Last year a little boy asked what made me the expert, and I was honest with him. I told him I was more afraid of earthquakes than any person I knew. You have to be honest with children. I described my reoccurring nightmare of being smothered in rubble. Do you know what “smothered” means? I acted out the word, gasping with my eyes popping out, crouching down on the carpet and clawing for air. As I recovered from the demonstration, he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a leaf that was almost in the shape of a shark. He said it was the best one; he showed me other ones he had collected, all of them more leaf than shark. Mine was the sharkiest. I carried it home in my purse; I put it on the kitchen table; I looked at it before I went to bed. And then in the middle of the night, I got up and pushed it down the garbage disposal. I just don’t have room in my life for such a thing. One question is: do they even have earthquakes in England? If they don’t, this is the wrong approach. But if they don’t, I have one more reason to want to live in the palace with him rather than convincing him to move into my apartment.

Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.

Forget the school visit. I would step into the pub. That’s what they call a bar over there. I would step into the pub. I would be wearing a skirt like the one he lifted in the dream. I would see him there with his friends and bodyguards. He wouldn’t notice me, he would be shining, each golden hair on his arms would be shining. I would go to the jukebox and put on “All I Need Is a Miracle.” This would give me confidence. I would sit at the bar and order a drink and I would begin to tell a yarn. A yarn is the kind of story that winds people in, like yarn around two hands. I would wind them in, the other people at the counter. There would be one part of the story that involved participation, something people would be compelled to chant at key moments. I haven’t thought of the story yet, but I would say, for example: “And again I knocked on the door and yelled,” and then everyone at the bar would chant: “Let me in! Let me in!” Eventually, all the people around me would be chanting this, and the circle of chanters would grow as they gathered in curiosity. Soon William would wonder what all the fuss was about. He would walk over with a bemused smile. What are the commoners doing now? I would see him there, so near to me, to every part of me, but I would not stop, I would keep spinning the yarn, and the next time I knocked on the door, he would shout with everyone else: Let me in! Let me in! And somehow this story, this amazing story that had already drafted half the English countryside, would have a punch line that called upon William alone. It would be a new kind of punch line, totally unlike “orange you glad I didn’t say banana.” This punch line would pull him to me, he would stand before me, and with tears in his eyes, he would beg me: Let me in! Let me in! And I would press his giant head against my chest, and because the yarn wasn’t quite over I would say:

Ask my breasts, my forty-six-year-old breasts.

And he would yell into them, muffled: Let me in, let me in!

And my stomach, ask my stomach.

Let me in, let me in!

Get down on your knees, Your Highness, and ask my vagina, that ugly beast.

Let me in, let me in, let me in.

The sun was collapsing with a glare that seemed prehistoric; I felt not only blinded but lost, or as if I had lost something. And again she appeared, the woman in the yellow bathrobe. This time she was in a little red car. She had not even put on her clothes; she was still wearing the robe. And she was yelling “Potato” so desperately that she was forgetting to stick her head out the window, she was yelling into the interior of the car uselessly, as if Potato were within her, like God. Her vaulted cry was startling, a true wail. She had lost someone she loved, she feared for his safety, it was really happening, it was happening now. And I was involved, because amazingly, I had just seen Potato. I ran over to the car.

He just went that way.

What!

Down Effie Street.

Why didn’t you stop him?

He was going so fast, it took me a moment to realize it was him.

It was Potato?

Yeah.

Was he injured?

No, he looked happy.

Happy? He was terrified.

As soon as she said this, I thought of how fast he was running and understood she was right. He was running in blind panic, in terror. A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes. We ignored him.

He went that way?

Yeah, but that was at least ten minutes ago.

Shit!

She roared off, down Effie Street. The boy stayed with me, as if we were together in this.

She lost her dog.

He nodded and glanced around, like the dog might be right nearby.

What’s the reward?

I don’t think there is one yet.

She has to have a reward.

This seemed crass to me, but before I could say so, the red car returned. She was driving slowly now. She rolled down her window, and I walked over with a spilled feeling inside. She was in a nightie. The yellow bathrobe had been formed into a little nest on the passenger seat, and in the nest was Potato, dead. I said I was terribly sorry. The woman responded with a look that told me I alone was responsible and she would share no words with a professional dog killer. I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.

She drove off, and the boy and I were alone again. I was only a few blocks from my house, but it was hard to walk away. I didn’t know what I would think about when I began moving again. William. Who was William. It felt perverse, almost illegal to think about him now. And exhausting. Suddenly it seemed as if our relationship took mountains of strength to maintain. She was probably burying the dog in her yard right now. I looked at the boy; he was the opposite of a prince. He had nothing. When my sister was in college, she used to sometimes take these boys home. She would call me the next morning.

I could see it in his pants, it was like half hard, so I could already tell it was big.

Please stop now.

But when he took off his pants, I almost shit on myself, I was like, Please honey, get that thing up in me, and quick!

I see.

And then he took out this tiny piece of black rope or something and tied it around his cock, and I’m like, What’s that for? And he just laughed in this nasty little-boy way. And I put on these tacky panties that I just got, they have a zipper in front that goes all the way around to the back? But he didn’t really like those, I guess, because he just pulled them off and told me to do myself. Have you ever heard a guy say it like that? Do yourself?

No.

Of course you haven’t. Anyways, I was rubbing and rubbing and I was super wet and he’s all pushing it in my face and I’m going crazy for it and then, you’re not going to believe this, he jizzes all over my face. Before I even get it in. Can you believe that?

Yes.

Well, yeah, I guess so. I guess he was really young and he probably’d never seen such white pussy before.

And then my sister paused to listen to the sound of my breath over the phone. She could hear that I was done, I had come. So she said goodbye and I said goodbye and we hung up. It is this way between us; it has always been this way. She has always taken care of me like this. If I could quietly kill her without anyone knowing, I would.

I looked at the boy; he was looking at me as if we had already agreed on something. Just by standing beside him for a minute too long, I had somehow propositioned him. I couldn’t leave him without some kind of negotiation.

You could wash my car.

For how much?

Ten dollars?

For ten dollars I won’t do anything.

Okay.

I opened my purse and gave him ten dollars and he walked down Effie Street toward certain death and I walked home. In the reoccurring dream, everything has already fallen down, and I’m underneath. I’m crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.