January
~ ~ ~
We just stepped into the violent blueness. It was as easy as that. They had given us directions. We made our way through the deserted streets lined with dingy housing projects. We wanted to hold hands, but we expressed our free will instead.
I'm scared, Iphi said.
I continued not using words.
The sound of our feet rasping pavement. The sound of traffic several blocks away.
I'm really scared, she said again.
We're all scared, I said. All across London, people are being really scared this very second.
The deserted streets becoming incrementally less deserted. Pedestrians flowing around us, a few at first, then more and more. A cute little blond girl in a biscuit-brown coat waddlewalking beside her mother. A rowdy knot of teenagers in soccer uniforms kidding their way toward the park for a game.
Iphi and I turning into just two more strolling along Lodge Road, a couple interchangeable with every other.
How is it possible to care for someone any more than this?
How is it possible to explain the act of forgiveness to someone who doesn't yet believe in such an idea?
She had known other boys, had almost married one: a twenty-year-old named Clayton who worked at a gas station in Eden Prairie. He wore grimy gray wifebeaters and possessed no fat whatsoever on his body.
Once when we were dating, Iphi showed me a photo she still kept of him and told me about how he bought her beer, cigarettes, pot, bags of chocolate cookies, all the bubblegum and Gobstoppers she could chew. On their one-month anniversary, he treated her to white lady for the first time. Iphi loved the shape of those sounds in her mouth. White lady. They tasted sexy.
Clayton and she sat in his pickup on the shore of the reservoir at night, radio playing Paradise of the Blind, black water glimmering before them, and drank, smoked, snorted, made out.
Chalked up, Iphi's head became a beehive.
My beautiful little girl, Clayton called her. My beautiful, beautiful little girl.
She had just turned sixteen and those were the most pleasing words she had ever heard.
She decided to do whatever he asked just to hear him say them again.
Iphi's father, a stonemason, called what the last thirty-five years had done to him a fucking bad joke without a punch line. He nicknamed his daughter The Chucklehead. Her mother, a night nurse, said the worst thing that had ever happened to her was meeting her husband. She nicknamed her daughter My Little Secretion. Iphi knew they were only teasing. She knew they appreciated her in their own way, that they would miss her if she ever went away, but not like Clayton appreciated her, not like he would miss her, nothing like that.
Sometimes Iphi and Clayton would shoplift together. Iphi kept the clerk busy by flirting with him. Clayton slipped into the aisles and pocketed what they wanted. They did it, not because they needed anything, not because they had to have a stupid bag of Skittles or Tootsie Pops or a can of Red Bull or whatever, but because it made them feel attentive, like they were doing something significant.
It made the moment, the day, the week feel full of kick.
They even developed a system of secret hand signs to communicate with each other.
Fist to chest: I love you.
Palm stretched wide open like a sun made of flesh: You make me so happy.
Two fingers laid along the side of the nose: Let's do another rail, babe. Let's do it right now, okay?
11:53. A bench at the edge of the boating lake in Regent's Park. Naked willows sagging into the hazy green water. An agitation of pigeons feeding along the paved banks.
We sat side by side watching old women in long black coats and children in baby blue parkas tossing out handfuls of breadcrumbs, seeds, leftover donuts, buns, the cold smog needling our lungs.
You thirsty? I asked.
What time is it?
Plenty for a drink. There's a cart over there. You want me to pick you up something? A Mountain Dew?
It's like we're just out for a Sunday stroll.
Pretty much, I said.
Like everybody around us is seeing a different world.
Yeah.
Like they're looking at something completely different no matter which way they turn.
Yeah, I said. Yes.
Who can explain how the call came at three o'clock in the afternoon, a time no one fears? How the only messages at three o'clock usually concern dentist appointments, dinner dates, requests to bring home a gallon of skim milk, an extra package of spaghetti, a box of breakfast cereal? How you were in the back of the 7-Eleven, retrieving a roll of paper towels for the dispenser in the men's room, when your cell began vibrating in your pocket? How you can recall the texture and heft in your hands, the tang of hot dogs and mustard in the air, the country-western music on the sound system?
Who can explain how the level voice of the female officer on the other end reminded you of a hostess telling you your table is ready: that flat, that automatic?
How you levitated there, wanting to ask her if she really knew what she was saying, because her language sounded pretend, like she was practicing, like she was some second-class actor not even close to getting her lines down?
We rented a small white farmhouse with black trim on two acres of barren land on the outskirts of town, and one night they simply started showing up.
We had been watching game shows where the contestants supply letters of the alphabet, or guess which aluminum suitcase among many aluminum suitcases contains a million dollars, when we heard rapping at our front door.
Outside a pair of church brothers in black suits, white shirts, black ties, shiny shoes, bright blue eyes. Their blond hair short, spiky, carrying so much product it appeared brownish in the yellow porch light.
They wouldn't stop smiling.
Their teeth were uncomfortably tiny.
At the start, they gave us minor tasks. Hiding this in the shed, burying that among the other data on my computer. They showed us how, patient, polite, soft-spoken, caring yet stern, focused, unflappable. They took as much time as we needed to get things right.
Gradually, the tasks became larger, more complicated. Passing this to the woman in the red D.A.R.E. t-shirt walking by you on the corner of Aldrich and 84th, taking photos of that with a disposable camera.
One time someone appeared while we were eating dinner and asked if the man waiting in his car in the driveway could spend the night with us.
We said yes.
We always said yes.
We always wanted to help any way we could.
Just hearing the word coke still makes me salivate, she said one night. We were watching a reality show about the famous young underfed woman, who was famous only for being famous and underfed, and her famous underfed friend. They were living on a farm for three days with a family that had nothing in common with them.
No one on the screen had mentioned the word coke. There had been no allusions to drugs.