The serial killer was in the darkness of an alley behind a bank, hiding; there was the woman tied up, her mouth stuffed with money; there were two policemen skirting the scene; the two good bank robbers were running to stop the policemen from doing the wrong thing; I couldn’t stand it; I decided not to watch, and I closed my eyes and then, like a pop-up book next to me opening, all I could really feel was him right there, breathing, that man.
A man. I repeated what he’d said to me in my head. I repeated it again. I repeated it again. On the screen the music was lurching higher, the cellos were speeding up, the strings were vibrating, and I was rising inside; I wanted him to know I’d heard him but I couldn’t say anything. My hands were silent in my lap and I began to cloak the air around myself, heavying it, thickening it with aggression and glamour, red velvet breathing, and I made the air seethe off me, onto him, to make him look over again; I wanted to force him to look over just by the power of my will. He kept his eyes on the movie. I thought of him with the bubbles:
Did you break it on purpose? Telling Ellen her symptoms. Inflate my heart. I kept my eyes closed and imagined leaning over pushing down the popcorn tub taking his face into mine and then stealing it with a kiss, just like that, we are sealed and joined. Living inside his mouth. Wrapping him up in my cloak. On the screen I can hear a gigantic shootout taking place; the bullets are whizzing through the air and burying into flesh and I can even hear the blood, splashing, cinematic, how red and wet blood sounds, and there are the moans the spare characters are sighing, loud: He got me! And I think of the dyslexic kid in the third grade who is the best drawer in school and how a few weeks before he made me a picture of a horse and wrote on top of it-to Moan-and how I’d oohed over the picture, the mane of the horse, the great proportions, but it made me want to hide, my name up there like that, transformed, just like that, into someone new. On the screen there are shouts and the music is shifting and it’s hinting at the sound of resolution, everything is okay now, almost, is it?” yes, it is, you can open your eyes now, but I don’t; I can hear they got the bad guy, the woman is freed, the chaos is melting back into order and the woman is leaning on something, comforted by the good cop, or the good robber, just someone good, and the movie music has switched to slow calm strings, it’s time for the viola to have its solo, this is the part the viola player tells his mother to listen to, but I keep my eyes closed because I want to kiss him and when you kiss someone your eyes are closed. I won’t do it but I want to and he is chewing next to me, 4 the last of the popcorn, cold by now; if he has felt anything from me, he is careful not to show it, and I am wrapped up in myself here, I have cloaked myself, I have sent surges of me over to him, 0 but he knows nothing. He is caught in his own wonderings. He is still watching, he is inside the movie and he is not mine.
My mother once told my father that she was taking me on vacation.
I can’t go, I said, I have homework. I was in junior high at the time. My father brought out his camera, but she waved him off. I wondered what was going on, if we were heading to the city or going fishing or what, but then she told him we’d be back by seven. We didn’t even get in the car. Just walked for an hour, past the stores, past the hospital, through empty lots, straight to the edge of town. It was sunset and the air was a bright gold, stretching out, dust particles lit like tiny lanterns. We were silent for a while, and then she said: Mona, out there somewhere is Africa.
We looked at the dry ground ahead of us, the stretch of horizon.
It seemed impossible. Even water seemed like a crazy idea. She let out a deep breath.
I want, she said, to take a train through Russia and end up in China and walk through Nepal and pet a goat in Italy and climb a pyramid in Egypt. I want to see the next town, she said.
I just want, she said, to eat a hamburger from a different family of cows
I kept staring out at the highway in the distance.
I like our town, is what I said to her. I like the movie theater here, how they give you popcorn in a glass bowl.
She put her hand on my hair then, circled it in a ponytail with her fingers, let it free. That’s not what I meant, she said to me. I like our town too.
We stood together and she played with my hair until it was dark and the dust turned invisible and we could just see the lights of incoming cars, moving up the highway, passing by. On the walk home we held hands for a bit, which made me feel like her prince, and then stopped at the one Chinese food restaurant and ordered twice as many dishes as we could eat. The bottoms of the huge white bags were warm as we walked the three blocks home, and I held my arms around them, smell rising into my nose: of crisp egg rolls, of brown sauce, of garlic and ginger. At home we spread the dishes over the table in rows.
My father walked over, rubbing his hands together, and I said, We just brought these over from China.
He smiled and rubbed my hair.
I built a tunnel underneath the house, I said. It only takes twenty minutes because it’s downhill both ways.
My mom winked at me, sticking a fork into each dish. There were so many choices: beef with ginger, oyster-sauce chicken, garlic broccoli, orange — peel pork. We piled our plates as high as we could manage, to create the whole land in our stomachs, to take the inside linings of our bodies on a visit to countries the outsides would never see.
That night, in bed, shadows moving over the ceiling in dark lakes, I heard my father shifting and coughing. A familiar sound, the settling and resettling of his throat. But that night it sounded like a slow
train to nowhere, wind steady and moving through his sIgn Of lungs, always chugging, circling the house, chug ga chug ga over and over and over again.
When Benjamin Smith and I left the movie theater, it was just getting dark and the sky was royal blue, the brightness that is post sunset and pre — night, the air like a dress.
I invited him over to my apartment for some reason. I played with the nails in my pocket-flat head, sharp tip.
We stood in my living room, awkward as poles.
Hey, he said, pointing to the pictures on the walls; I recognize these artists, he said. He especially liked Lisa’s row of eye lashed 9’s in the grass. According to Lisa, 9’s are girls, because according to elementary school art, boys have no eyelashes. In an effort to decorate, I’d plastered my living room with the spiky suns and sky bands of blue of my students-Danny’s war where the people shot 7’s, Mimi’s 3 dog.
I was laughing to him about Mimi, saying something about the way she wrote her name, how she dotted her i’s in a new way each week, how this week she was dotting them with hexagons because we were learning shapes, when he leaned in and kissed me, just like that, he traversed the space and halved it, then quartered it, then eighthed it, then shut it down completely until there was no space between us at all and his lips were warm and tasted like butter from the popcorn.
His hand slid under the back of my shirt, palm on spine, strong.
I wasn’t sure what was happening. It seemed that we were kissing The science teacher, with burns up and down his arms. His lips, my hand on his face, on the back of his neck.
Minutes and minutes of this, of his face with mine.
Then I dipped out. Said excuse me; turned to go to the bathroom.
He turned too.
I’m just going to the bathroom, I said. Let me walk you there, he said.
I laughed at him, his eyes now drooping and earnest, but he stuck by my side.
I’ll be right back, I said, in the hallway, by the bathroom door, bleary, closing in again on his face and we kissed, soft, and I kissed his teeth and he smelled like pine and coffee and sweat.
Excuse me, I said again. I’ll just be a minute.