I fell easily down the stairs and by the time I was able to stand, to my great surprise, a cab had come. “Thank you,” I called up to the beautiful children in the bathroom, but it was a gurgle and I knew they weren’t listening.
I kept the phone on my desk for several days wondering what to do about it. There was something wrong with the phone; it didn’t ring. Garla’s phone would ring, wouldn’t it?
It didn’t ring until the fourth day.
“Hi Womun.” It was Garla. I began explaining how I’d meant to give it back, etc., but she stopped me quite quickly, “It your phone for me. I call you with it,” she said, to which I could’ve said a lot of things, like how I already have a phone, or that I was very afraid of getting killed for this jewel-phone, should someone see me talking on it in my neighborhood, because I don’t have a lot of money and neither does anyone else who lives here, but oftentimes people badly need money, for personal reasons, and desperate times/desperate measures.
“I get you for fashion show,” she said, “tonight at the seven-thirty.”
Out of some type of pride I wanted to make sure that she didn’t mean I would be in the fashion show, that it wasn’t an ironic thing where the beautifuls each try to snag themselves an ugly, and whoever snags the ugliest ugly and dresses it up is the winner. “You mean go watch one with you?” I asked, and she said “Ha,” then lit a cigarette and said, “Ha. Ha. I mean this,” and told me where to meet her.
Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.
At the oxygen bar, Garla gives my face three firm slaps on the cheek. She is always taking grandmotherly liberties such as these. “Put you in special coffin,” she says, which is a term of endearment on her part but I don’t know what it means exactly. I like to think that it’s a sort of Snow White reference, that I’m dear to her in some way that entails it would be pleasant for her to have me on her nightstand forever asleep in a glass box. Though I guess it could also mean she wants to say goodnight and close me inside an iron maiden.
Garla is sitting in front of a laptop with a solar charger plugged into it, although it is raining outside and we are in a darkened room. Garla doesn’t have opinions on things; she’s not really the pro or con type. Right now she is into global warming because she knows that global warming is chic. Things are either chic or they aren’t, and if they’re chic then they’re for Garla. “The web won’t come,” Garla says.
“Solar charger,” I point out. “There’s no sun.”
“Global warming,” Garla says. She will often randomly say the media titles of controversial topics, such as “Crisis in Darfur,” then take a drink and be silent for a few more hours.
A woman wearing a unisex hemp robe enters with two tanks and two breathing masks, hooking Garla in first. With the mask on Garla appears to be a pilot from the future, possibly a computer-generated one. Her perfect skin looks like a plasma screen.
“I love your accent,” the smocked woman says. “Where are you from?”
“Vodka, you know?” says Garla, and the woman’s eyes frown; perhaps she has just Botoxed because I can tell she really wants to frown but her eyes simply flutter a little.
“Could she get a glass of vodka,” I translate, and the woman mentions that alcohol is not usually consumed during the treatment. She is already on the way to get it though, and when she returns there’s also a glass for me.
It gets a little overwhelming in the mask when the pure oxygen starts to hit us at the same time as the vodka. Garla takes my hand. I don’t know if I’m attracted to her or if she’s just beautiful. I think it’s the latter because she doesn’t say much, and what she does say doesn’t make much sense. But people don’t have to talk a lot or make sense for others to love them. Just look at dogs and babies.
“Cloud of vodka!” Garla screams. I decide she wants another glass because I want another glass, so I hold two fingers up at the woman in hemp while pointing down to our melted ice. Garla, I think, you are a magic swan with Tourette’s. My fingers stay in an upright “peace” position; with our masks I imagine that Garla and I are on some kind of extreme rollercoaster that goes into the stratosphere, and we’re passing the camera that takes a picture for us to buy at the end, and I am saying, “This is me and Garla. Peace.”
She has made me the best-dressed party nerd of all time. Once, she put these chain link pants on me and I couldn’t move, not even like a robot. Garla—wearing six-inch stiletto heels—actually picked me up, carried me up the stairs to the party, and planted me by yet another fish tank, either so I’d have something to watch or because she knew that at some point, a part of her body would be posing inside of it and she very much wanted for me to be there to say, “Now Garla has to go home” when it started to get boring for her.
There was never a conversation where Garla hired me to be her assistant. I just started speaking up when it made sense to, like when people asked if they could cut her arm a tiny bit with a sword in order to drink a drop of it off the blade’s tip and she answered them with “Special coffin,” in a very tiny voice. “We have to go, Garla,” I used to say, but I soon learned that “Garla has to go” is a better way to phrase it, because then it seems like it’s entirely out of her control and she doesn’t have a choice. Garla does not like choices.
Tonight we go to another fashion show. Garla’s walking in it so I wait backstage in the chair where her makeup was done, and at several points people inquire as to why I’m there. Very few actually want me to leave; they’re just genuinely trying to understand.
Afterwards we go to the home of a fellow model where I watch Garla drink herself into a deep sea. She is a metronomcial drinker. I can count the glasses she drinks per hour, like a time signature, and know exactly how drunk she is at any given moment. With me it’s the opposite; the drunk is that mystery wedding guest who may show up early, late, or not at all. By four a.m. Garla is lying on an island countertop in the kitchen. Some guy has dumped a miniature Buddhist sand garden out on her abdomen, and he’s swirling the sand around over her stomach with a tiny bamboo rake. Her head is not on the counter; it’s flipped back like a Pez dispenser, and I walk over and we have this intoxicated moment.
“I know you’re more,” my drunken eyes say. They say this in a breathy, hesitant manner that insists it has taken a lot of time for them to work up the courage to say such a thing, without words nonetheless.
“Yes,” answer Garla’s eyes, and like all of Garla’s answers it is a mysterious pearl whose full value I begin to appraise immediately. I walk over to her and lift her head up with my hands so it is level with the counter, holding it. I look down at her like a surgeon.
“Some type of sausage,” Garla says; she likes the cured meats.