I sit looking out the airplane window now. We land soon. I never return home from Nigeria the same person I was before. But this time takes the cake.
Minutes after takeoff, I felt a rush of relief like no other. I was glad to be leaving the motherland. After what happened, I needed some serious space. I scratched at a mosquito bite on my arm. It was red and inflamed and I knew I should leave it alone. But damn, the thing was itchy. Nigerian mosquito bites were always the worst. You never feel them land on you and then you can't stop feeling the itch of their bites.
I was glad to be sitting near the window. The plane was pretty packed, so turning to the window gave me at least a little privacy. I looked closely at my mosquito bite, rubbing it with my thumb as opposed to digging at it with my nail, the way I wanted to. The more I rubbed, the better it felt. The less itchy. The less red.
"Oh shit," I whispered. The guy beside me looked at me with raised eyebrows. I smiled at him and shook my head.
It was as if I'd rubbed off the mosquito bite. My skin was healed back to its usual brown. I quickly got up.
"Excuse me," I whispered as I made my way into the aisle. I went straight to the bathroom. Once inside, I unbuttoned my blouse. I had all types of scratches from the incident. I touched the painful bruise on my side and ran my finger across it. Erased like chalk on a chalkboard. I undid my jeans and rubbed the scratches on my legs. I rubbed my hands all over. Then, naked, I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. Not a scratch, bruise, pimple or blemish on my body.
I was thirty-nine years old. Happy with my life. "Why?" I whispered. "Shit, shit shit! No, no, no." I was a cop. And I loved being a cop. Now what will I become? I wondered. I considered asking my hands. But what if they answer? I thought.
I sit here looking out the window at the ocean below. What will become of me?
I hear a sharp scream behind me. Then a gasp. "I… I didn't… he tried to… " The sound of commotion. A woman yells, "Get his hands!"
"Oh my God!"
Grunting, screeching, shouting. I jump up along with everyone around me. We're all probably thinking of the same thing. Terrorists, 9/11. I whirl around to see what's happening. It's a sight to behold.
There are five men piled in the aisle. Two of them are dark-skinned Africans; one wears a white caftan and there is bright red blood smeared on it. One of them is Asian, he wears a black suit with a golden dragon pin on the left breast pocket. Two of them are white men; one in jeans and a t-shirt, another in a navy blue suit. They sit on, hold down, and punch a young white man, mashing his head to the floor. The young man's wide eyes water and he sweats profusely. His face is beet red. He's breathing heavily and babbling, "Get me off this goddamn plane! I want to get off! GET ME OFF!"
In the seat before them, a woman lies in a man's arm. She coughs, her hands to her throat. A yellow number two pencil protrudes from the side of her neck. Blood spurts and dribbles down. The man holding her, an old Igbo-looking man in Western attire, looks absolutely lost.
I look at my hands. I don't even hesitate.
Swell by Elizabeth Bear
Of course you notice the blind girl.
After you've packed up the merchandise table and started clearing the stage, she lingers, beached with small white hands wrapping the edges of her little café table like bits of seaweed dried there. She clings to scarred black wood as if something might sweep her adrift and drown her.
The crowd breaks and washes around her, flowing toward the door. The wrist loop of her white cane pokes over the back of her chair like a maritime signal flag, in case you somehow missed the opacity of her face-wrapping black shades in the near-dark of the club. And still she remains, a Calypso on her tiny island, while you coil patch cables and slide your warm mahogany fiddle into its case, while the café staff lift chairs onto tables and bring the house lights up glaringly bright, until you start to wonder if whoever she's waiting for is coming to assist her.
The tall redheaded bartender polishes glasses, her apron tossed over the Sam Adams Boston Lager draft handle. Up in the crude timber-built mezzanine, institutional stoneware makes flat clicking sounds and sticky food smells as someone piles it into a washtub. Your sweat's turned cold with the stage lights off, and your flat shoes reek of spilled beer. You're just packing the fiddle pickup into its hand-cut foam when you see Little Eddie the house manager (little to keep him straight from Big Eddie the redheaded bartender) come through the kitchen doors and notice the blind girl.
He starts forward, turning sideways to miss skinny dreadlocked Clara as she pauses with the washtub full of plates, but you set the pickup on the closed fiddle case and hop off the riser so you can get to the girl first. Nobody needs Little Eddie at the end of a bad night. You've had enough bad nights here to know.
He sees you coming and lets his steps go purposeless, turning to stack the glasses on the worst table in the joint-behind the pillar, next to the kitchen-so he can keep a hairy eyeball on you. You come over to the blind girl's table, careful to make some noise, and stop four feet from her.
"Miss, do you need some help?"
She doesn't lift her chin to seek your voice, which makes you think she's been blind since birth. She does tilt her head, however, a vertical crease appearing on her brow.
"You're the singer," she says. She sounds like the cold outside has gotten into her sinuses, her voice rough as if its nap caught on a sandpaper throat. "Has everyone gone home, then? I like to wait for the crowds to clear."
When she lets go of the table-edge, you can imagine you hear her flesh peel free of the wood. It wobbles as she releases it, rocking back and forth on crooked coaster feet for a moment before settling down with a little list to the left. House left. Her left. Your right.
"Everybody's gone," you say. "We're closing up. Do you have somebody to help you get home?"
"Oh," she says, "I can manage."
She's plain, with bland colorless hair to go with the transparent skin, but even stuffy and hoarse, her voice lifts the fine hairs on your nape like a breath.
Dubiously, you glance at the light jacket draping her chair, the summerweight, girl-cut t-shirt stretched over her bony shoulders. Even more dubiously, you glance at the door. Each time it opens, the cold washes into the café. Each time, it takes two seconds for the cold to cross the open floor and curdle on your skin.
Of course, she can't read your body language. So you clear your throat and say, "You know it's January out there."
"I know my way home." As if to prove her point, she stands and gathers her red-tipped cane and jacket. She starts working her way into the latter one sleeve at a time, but the cane gets in her way. You'd offer to take it, but there's no way to catch her eye.
"Sure," you say. "But I can drop you. I'm parked out back."
"You want me to get into a car with a stranger?"
You laugh. "What's going to happen?"
"Sometimes serial killers have women who find victims for them," she says, and you'd think she was totally sincere if the corner of her mouth wasn't turning upward just a little.
"You can call home before we leave and tell them I'm bringing you. And everybody here will see us leave together."
She's on the hook, but it's not set yet. She chews the inside of her cheek.
"I'll even warm the car up before I bring it around," you promise, and just like that she says, "Okay."
She moves toward you, cane swinging, and you stand aside. She taps expertly towards the door. You follow her from the music hall, thinking that it's weird that after all that she didn't give you a chance to go and fetch the car. She's still going to have to wait while you load your gear.