At least it seemed to be wholly her world. My clumsy gestures grew smoother and more acute under her guidance and as her kisses and caresses grew more passionate, I began to mimic them. My next erection followed soon after and she guided it gently into the soft, wet darkness between her thighs. We remained very still for a while after that—neither our hands nor our hips moved more than a slight quiver as she looked deep into my eyes and smiled her first real and perfect smile. By the time we began our slow rhythmic movements I knew, from the feel of our interlocked bodies and from that sweet, understanding face, that both our lives had been irrevocably changed.
When I finally slept, I dreamed of her. We were standing at the gravely edge of a body of water at night, with only the light of a distant suspension bridge delineating us in the darkness. She looked at me and began to speak. The things she said were shocking and horrifying, but they made perfect sense to my dream-self. I remembered the entire dream in vivid detail the next morning—all except the words she had spoken.
She grew more at ease within the grimy, chaotic confines of my apartment and widened her palette to include an increasing variety of foods in my cupboards and refrigerator. If anything, she paid less attention to me than she had before we’d first made love. As soon as I turned off the lights and crawled into bed each night, she would crawl in with me and we would make love for half the night, so that I found it almost impossible to get up in the morning for work. I finally had to start going to bed two hours earlier than usual. As we made love or held each other tenderly afterward, I seemed to be the absolute center of her life. But the next morning or the next evening, I was merely a more active, more transitory piece of furniture in a tiny room in which she seemed to be hiding from something… out there.
I gave her a name. Mona. My mother (the original Mona) died when I was four years old, and so I felt no particular attachment to the name—at least none that I realized, but it gave me comfort to bestow the name on the frail, bewildered and unceasingly curious girl. Most of the time I believed she was a simpleton and that I was doing her a favor by protecting her from the outside world, by trying to find foods she could eat, trying to teach her to speak, all the tiny gestures that seemed to fail at every turn but which, in the end, always brought her back to my bed.
I would dream of her almost every night after our love-making. Sometimes it would be just the two of us, sometimes there would be others, loud, shadowy and enveloped in a thick luminescent haze that seemed to spread for vast distances across landscapes that, as weeks progressed, became more and more uninviting, even threatening. In these dreams she always spoke with words that I could never remember upon awakening, trying to lure me into the bright haze that seemed to recede from us as we approached, the haze that was so full of cascading, breathtaking lifeforms too diffuse to see clearly, but always very real and, in spite of their retreat, always very near.
III
And so Mona consumed those late fall and early winter months. We did not communicate; we rarely even looked each other in the eye and I never quite got over the sensation that she was—or would have preferred to be—completely oblivious to my presence. But I was utterly dependent on the sound of her breath, of the creaking floor beneath her feet, of the fact that this creature had consented to keep me company and in only a few months had made the vision of my past life almost unbearable to remember. And that she made love to me, that even in some strange, limited way, I was someone’s lover, began to strengthen my confidence and gave me the sense that I was a functioning, even determining factor in the world around me, a world that had always seemed close to collapsing upon me.
But she grew restless. She discovered the apartment door—as though it had never been there before. She would tug at it and pound on it and I was afraid the commotion would bring too much attention to us. So I gave her a key, taught her how to use it, bought her some winter clothes and a coat, took walks with her and, finally, because I was afraid to use the physical force to stop her, I allowed her to go out by herself. I told myself this was only right, that otherwise I was her jailer, she was my prisoner—or worse, my pet. And yet Mona was not a normal human being, was she? She was no longer with her people and I was the only thing between her and that hostile world out there, the world that had crushed me, the one she had stared at with such wide-eyed amazement one night from the top of a set of concrete stairs.
Soon she began staying out late or, once in a while, all night. I couldn’t ask where she’d gone, and though I considered it, I never really had the nerve to follow. I just sat in my apartment fretting, no longer understanding or even wanting to understand the loneliness and solitude I had learned to accept in my previous life, merely aching for that presence, that touch, those simple, living sounds.
She would return with things she’d found on the street. I tried to keep her from bringing them in, but at these moments she would suddenly grow hostile and protective. Desiccated rat and pigeon corpses, rusted shards of metal, branches, wire, all of which she would arrange methodically in the darkest corner of my apartment and hide behind a sheet. I stopped protesting, because more than disgust over the garbage she insisted on accumulating in my apartment, I felt fear of her independence. She could leave and never come back. The possibility was inconceivable.
I tried to ignore the shrine she was constructing behind the sheet, this complex mingling of forms that after a while no longer seemed random at all. They were no longer dried corpses or discarded hubcaps and splintered boards; they were minor elements in a dense and disturbing mosaic. Mona was reconstructing something of her own world in this tiny corner of mine.
In late February I began walking to work along Lower Wacker Drive, after having avoided it completely since the day I saved Mona from her Shabbie attacker. I found no trace of them—only a cloud of white spray-paint where someone had scrawled BEWARE OF THE SHABBIE PEOPLE.
I wondered where she went at night. Would she have remembered the train ride up to my neighborhood; would she know how or have money to pay and get on the “L” train and find her way down here on her own? There were times when I would linger down there as though all it would take was the right squint and the right tilt of my head in order to see them there. I wondered if she came down here to do this very thing, not knowing how to find them and trying desperately to summon them back from whatever inaccessible netherworld into which they’d retreated, crying out for them to take her away from this cold, bleak place and the stumpy little man who held her prisoner.
Then one night, during an unseasonably warm spell after weeks of heavy snows, I walked Lower Wacker, avoiding the widening pools and the spouts of water spilling from the streets above and whining to myself about Mona, whom I had not seen in two days. Had she disappeared for good? Could something have happened to her? I wandered Lower Wacker for a while, drinking in the desolate and expansive solitude that seemed like such a perfect extension of my mood.
The area where the Shabbies used to stand was now under a foot of water. As I stepped to the edge of this pond I saw a rat half-swim, half-scurry across it, cutting a line of splashes neatly down the middle. As the waters settled, erasing all traces of the rat’s pathway, I saw what I believed to be a reflection of the ceiling above me, and my tired eyes began to unfocus along the strange contours formed there.