The Drowning Man

I met her in a bookstore. Some raunchy campus bookstore with dildos and vibrators and hot oils and blow up dolls and t-shirts and used CDs and vinyl records and posters and incense and rolling papers and bath salts and poppers and Noam Chomski paperbacks. I had an interview across the street and I was forty minutes early. I parked on the street, paid the meter, and figured I’d buy some gum or some kind of talisman to help me get the job because I always believe in talismans and jujus and gum. I have always believed that the Gods can be swayed by some trinket or some spell or some lucky item of clothing that only worked if I wore it, or had it in my possession. And I have always believed that the person sitting across the table from me in an interview could smell my breath or my sweaty armpits the way they say dogs can smell fear, so I had no intention to leave the wrong impression such that a malodorous mouth or rank armpit would impart.

It was an interview for a job as a claims adjustor for some national agency that advertises exclusively during sport games, collegiate or professional, because men are their target customer and they believe that women follow men when it comes to car insurance. It might be different if they sold dish detergent or cars themselves, but they don’t. They do not say this outright anywhere, of course, but they believe it like gospel because adequate research has confirmed it. That is why you will never see their commercials during any daytime soap-opera or while watching The Bachelor, if you happen to be one of those dreadfully inane people who watch The Bachelor – or it’s equally atrocious female compatriot, The Bachelorette featuring some mewling halfwit bawd.

It is a sad truth that people like to watch car accidents. They’re drawn to them like moths to light. They like to watch people get hurt or accosted in some way. They are sadists and they like scintillation. There is no money value to it, though there is to exploit it, but it is entertainment and that explains much in this society we find ourselves paddling through. It explains how newspapers were so successful for so long and how click-bait works today on social media platforms. I was a social worker and I believe firmly that the majority of social workers do not do it to help people, though, when frustrated, they often give their clients the spiel about how they could be making much more money doing something else. At all the retreats and seminars other social workers will say the same thing. We aren’t in this for the money. They all claim they’re altruists that do it for the less fortunate, and they may actually even believe that they do. But they don’t. They do it to get paid to see the tragedies they’d normally watch for free if it were a TV show. Or if it were spilled out on asphalt on the freeway. The domestic violence. The drug abuse. They love the hopeless addict. The 600 pound chain-smoker with 57 cats who hasn’t thrown anything away since 1994. 

I was wandering through the shop and she was there standing in front of me across a table of vinyl records, casually flipping through people’s life work. She looked up at the same time I did and I was lost there. Taken, really. Kidnapped from my good senses and held for seemingly no purpose, without ransom. I wasn’t at all interested in buying a record, but I was killing time because 40 minutes is too early to go to an interview. They would think I was desperate, which wouldn’t bode well for me. 20 minutes early is acceptable, but no more. It felt as though I drowned when I saw her. Love for me has been a series of rare drownings. The depth of which I drown is inconsequential, but it is all that separates one from the other. Depth. It isn’t the most incredible feeling in the world. It wasn’t love at first sight, or lust. But it was a defining feeling. It was the definite feeling of having been hit by a truck and dragged a while to another place and time.

“You going to stare at me all day?” she chided.

“I wasn’t staring.”

“Oh, sure.”

The most defining thing about her was her contrasts. Her black hair against her pale skin. She had amazingly beautiful features. She was short and thin and had pale azure eyes, a delicate nose and full lips. She exploited what flaws she had. A scar on her cheek. Slightly crooked teeth. She was bruised and tattooed. She looked gothic or anemic. Knee high socks and black combat boots laced to her battered shins. Black eyeliner and heavy on the lip gloss. She was not into society. She was a willful reject who had burnt her normal card which buys you peaceful meals at Olive Garden free of stares and silent ridicule and judgment. It buys you jobs and a decent credit score. It buys you acceptance into the net until life cans and shelves you in some supermarket afterlife. She looked like a cocotte. She probably was. Her knees were bruised and her arms were as well. She might have been a junkie, but she had healthy enough teeth and a beautiful smile to dispute the conjecture. It was obvious though that she didn’t smile because she was happy. She seemed to smile only when she was putting a knife into something and right then, I was that something. She was a sadist, probably a masochist as well, but of her own doing.

God, she was beautiful but there was nothing Godly about her. She had a pentagram tattooed on her right-inner forearm and a Ouija board inked on her stomach which was exposed by the bottom four buttons of her shirt being left casually undone. She had obscene hoop earrings with black cats dangling from them. Her cheeks were pierced and I expected her tongue would be split but was relieved when she spoke to see it wasn’t. She looked like a reptile, though. Not in a bad way. A snake in a pet shop aquarium waiting for her mouse. Indifferent to it when at last it was dropped in. She looked like someone who loved Halloween and sword swallowing and fifty shades of necromancy. 

“What are you doing in here, Norm?” she inquired.

“My name isn’t Norm.”

“Meant because you’re a norm. As in – normal. You belong in Starbucks or Old Navy. This shithole isn’t your cup of tea.”

“I have an interview across the street and...”

She walked away as though she lost interest, but I followed to explain myself having always been one to see everything to an end, not realizing I was that mouse following the very snake that would eat me. One thing that was apparently obvious about her was that she never cared to see anything through. When she lost interest, she abandoned it. There was an unequivocal freedom to it and in her that perhaps, as astute and perceptive as I was not, I envied.

“Do you work here? I was looking for something that would bring me good luck.”

“Does it look like I work here, Norm?”

“Kind of. I doubt there’s a uniform.”

She smiled, as though against her will. “No, I go to the art school up the street.”

“You’re an artist? Well, cool.”

“Yeah. Cool,” she mocked. “See ya, Norm.”

“You know, I’m not really that normal –”

“All Norms say that.”

“These clothes are just for the interview.”

She nodded and walked away. She was holding three records and a bottle of some kind of oil. I imagined her apartment smelled of patchouli, stale weed and pizza boxes. I imagined there were empty liquor bottles and the bruises all over her were from being drunk. When you’re a social worker they teach how to recognize the age of a bruise. There is a color chart and each color matches a specific time period since the injury that caused the bruise. She had all the colors. But there were none on her face. I wondered what the rest of her look liked. I wondered because I was programmed to wonder. Either as a man programmed by Mother Nature to want to see attractive members of the opposite sex naked, or as a social worker to investigate her bruises for signs of abuse. I would make an excellent claims adjuster, I thought. This was to be my angle. I have investigated abused people for over 10 years, thereby, I can certainly investigate crashed cars and make the appropriate assessment. It wasn’t that much different at all, I’d go on. I hoped not to sound pompous. That is a fatal error in interviewing. Pomposity. Pretentiousness.

“I had 29 minutes until the interview. 9 more at least to kill. She took her things to the register to check out. I veered away from the sex toys and headed to the shallows of the paperbacks. They smelled musty which was comforting. They were used. There were stains on them. Their spines were worn. Creased corners of once dog-eared pages were plenty. Important sentences were underlined or highlighted for use as quotes in last minute essays. Doodles on empty pages. “Gently-used books” was the term on the paper that was taped to the shelf. I suppose she was right and I was dreadfully normal. Here I was in a shop of scintillating oddities and I perused the paperbacks – the most normal thing there was in the place. I was hopeless in my own way. There was never a way I would be her. I would never give up my house in the suburbs to move to some shitty apartment on campus. I was in a shirt and tie and a conservative black jacket that every normal guy has, a Calvin Klein with two squirts of Dolce and Gabbana cologne on my neck which I only wear on important dates and to weddings and job interviews. There she was in thrift store clothes. Ripped socks and bruises like cheetah spots. Like a wrecked Mercedes Benz. I was the economical cornflower-blue Toyota Corolla. Not even a fun color.

I didn’t find my talisman, but I took two books to the counter to buy. She was checking out. She came up three dollars short and she didn’t have a card to charge it. She had a wad of nefarious cash she had pulled out of a duck-taped purse. All ones. She dropped a tampon and left it lie at her feet. She had blue pointy fingernails and tattoos on her fingers that I couldn’t make out. Letters of some kind. Oh, fuck, she sighed. She said she was going to put something back, but I took out a five and gave it to the kid at the register who didn’t seem to care for either of us at all. He had a poodle of flaxen hair and looked stoned or as if he was spending every minute of his life reevaluating everything he ever did to figure out why he was here all while doing his job as a morning shift shop clerk on a busy college campus. He was rebooting while remaining functional. You could practically hear his circuits fragmenting as he blankly stared.

“You don’t have to,” she said re-stuffing her purse of its contents, minus the emergency tampon. “I won’t be in debt to ya.”

“No debt. Just three dollars less I’ll blow at Starbucks for half a coffee. You’re doing me a favor, really.”

“So it is,” she grinned uneasily.

I didn’t expect that she would be waiting for me outside of the store, but there she was like an inept fidgety mugger. She asked what I bought, though I could tell she didn’t really care. “A book on mythology. I liked the artwork of Medusa’s head on the spine,” I explained pointing it out to her. “And a Kurt Vonnegut novel I read once in high school that I really liked.”

“Um. A book you already read?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you find your good luck charm?”

“No. And no gum, either. Oh, well.”

She pulled a pack of winterfresh out of her purse and gave me two sticks. Then as though we were not standing in the middle of a sidewalk where people walked past us every few seconds, she pulled her panties down beneath her skirt and carefully stepped out of them, holding onto my arm as she lifted her slender legs out of them. 

“Here,” she said handing the pair of blue lacy panties to me which dangled from a finger. “Oh, wait,” she pulled them back before I could take them, plucked a sharpie from her purse, and wrote something on the small tag. “These are for good luck. Put them in your pocket. You can’t fail. See ya, Norm!” She then darted across the street, was nearly hit by a Volvo, and barely caught a bus that took her out of my life about as fast as she had entered it. On the tag she had written her name and number, oddly legible.

I smiled and shook my head, never imagining I’d see her again. Never dreaming I’d call the number. But I got the job and so my office was across the street from the head shop where I met her and I saw it every day I came and went. Jenna was her name. It didn’t fit her as well as Norm fit me. I kept her panties in my pocket when I needed good luck and for several weeks strange things happened to me that led me to believe the Gods were in fact swayed by that bizarre girl’s underwear.

I felt compelled to call her and tell her a month or so later around Halloween. I didn’t get an answer, so I texted. I kept it brief. I acted indifferent. It took me my entire lunch break to decide what to say. I wondered if she would even remember me. A week passed and she didn’t reply. Then at four in the morning I got a message from her that said, “Told ya, Norm. Congrats! :)” That was it.

I didn’t reply. She was a dead end. A black cat. The Hindenburg. A ticket to board the Titanic. She was The Little Big Horn. She was a venereal disease waiting to happen. She was a grassy knoll and I was JFK. She was Booth’s derringer and I was Lincoln’s unsuspecting head. She was the Space Shuttle Challenger. She was every bad decision that I had never made but wanted to make. Every drug I’ve never tried but wanted to try, even the ones I didn’t. She was everything and my level of preoccupation about her, staring at the little tag on a pair of blue lacy size small panties drove me absolutely mad. Fixation, is a word for it. Obsession is another, though it sounds far too sinister. It was as though I had drank some potion and all I could think of was her. So I texted her again. And predictably, about a week or so later she texted back.

We began to make love in the back of her old Ford Escape SUV in the Kroger parking lot near my work. “Love.” How dare I use the word that so unsuitably describes the utter depravity of our lustful romps. Love is an old couple in a diner holding hands eating lunch. Love is being faithful to a deceased husband or wife. Love is church on Sunday with the kids. Love was not the unorthodox lunch hour sex we had. Pounding her between the seats where the loose change went. I was not ashamed as I should have been and after a while I was not ashamed at all. It became my life. My shame surrendered to my shamelessness. To my desire to be impetuous and primitive and raw. I was consumed with her so entirely it was as though aliens abducted me and I was on a weird paradoxical planet of sex with a million hers. I was no less than a junkie, only I had no track marks racing up my arms and I had all my teeth and no scabs on my skin to tell my sordid tale. If one could watch me, all those social workers would line up in droves and look through a glass window and peer in at my defilement. I would be a highly-rated TV show for the TV gawkers. Better than The Bachelor or My 600 Pound Life. I was the fatal car accident that slows traffic to a painful yet interested crawl. The body left lying in a ditch. The blood on the highway. The magnificent hoarder. The drowning man.

Maybe I thought too much of myself and my tragedy. Maybe it was normal. Just not my normal. Screwing a deranged art student in a grocery store parking lot three times a week. Then getting so used to it we shopped afterwards sometimes when she needed groceries. She would mention that my baby gravy was running down her leg in the same sentence that she needed orange juice and bagels. I felt like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Gorge, but Jenna didn’t seem to think much of it – that it was either pleasurable or bizarre in the least. It seemed like to her it was just something to do. She enjoyed it, she said when I asked on direct examination. I wouldn’t come back if I didn’t. I don’t waste time, she said. It’s the only thing of value in this world.

I wouldn’t have known that much based upon her expression. She looked like someone getting her teeth cleaned while I was nailing her to the backseat of her car while glancing out the window for parkers. She smiled when she caught me looking. When I thought I heard the wheel of a cart squeal nearby, or someone’s voice drawing near. She was knifing me, reveling in my discomfort. I believe it turned her on. Public sex. But she seldom expressed a pleasurable look other than the very moment when she orgasmed and then she was nothing less than a bursting 90 pound rocket suffering ventricular fibrillation.

It went on this way for several months. Through Christmas. I bought her a Christmas gift. She was a remarkably difficult person to shop for I discovered as I stumbled awkwardly into the holiday season with her and I becoming somewhat of regular thing, dangerously close to a relationship, dare I say. She had no particular style I could pinpoint. She loathed brand name clothes and products and perfume. She wasn’t a Christian, rather, she declared herself a Luciferian, which I gathered was something of a Satanist, but not exactly. Fruit of the same tree. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, she said to me dryly when I was fishing for gift ideas. I bought her a new record player. A high-quality one with all the bells and whistles. I gave it to her after she went to church services with me and spent the weekend at my house in the suburbs watching It’s a Wonderful Life and The Christmas Story and The Grinch. We made cookies we decorated. We drank wine. She didn’t burn up going in to church, as she reasoned she would. But she attracted stares that only relented when I gave them back. She wore a black petticoat that concealed most of her gothic garb, but her torn black stockings and black scuffed boots with the unlaced buckles gave her away as a misfit of some kind. Not one of us norms. She was a tourist. A trollop.

She said she liked the candlelit vigil, though she assured me that all the while she prayed to Lucifer. I said I didn’t mind. I didn’t think Jesus would mind, either. She said she didn’t wear panties and thought about putting my hand up her skirt, but she didn’t. Restraint was never her specialty. We went to dinner at Olive Garden that Saturday then watched the snow fall from my bedroom window in front of the glowing street light without hardly saying a word. She was warm in my arms and purred softly as I cradled her, giving something to me I could tell she had never given to anyone before. Then she cried for a minute or so, though I pretended not to notice. I imagine it was for the daughter she seldom saw who lived with her ex-boyfriend. Or maybe it was for her mother, who I think was dead. I think rather than praying to Lucifer in church as she had said she did, she prayed to God for them. Her daughter was 6, she told me once when we did shots in some campus bar around Thanksgiving. But six was the final word she ever said of her.

Sometime in February when I was allowed to come visit her in her apartment when her roommate was gone (who I learned was a guy), I saw that record player unopened, still in the box. That is just how things were with her. Nothing seemed to mean anything or to really matter. She had no apparent desires other than the very innate and basic instincts that burden us all, and she was the least material person I ever knew. I suppose it was the Satan in her. For all the bad things you can say of Satan, or Lucifer, or Beelzebub, I like to think with an open-mind that he is probably not very material. Maybe only due to the austerity of Hell. I learned when I was young that a person ought to find the good in someone and focus on that rather than the rest. That is the good of Lucifer, in my humble view. He doesn’t give a damn for Starbucks. But maybe I am all wrong and maybe I have now punched my ticket to Hell.

It all changed after Christmas. When she went home. When I thought she and I were something that neither of us had ever declared, I for the fact that I knew she was not normal enough for the suburbs and stepmotherhood, and she for the fact that she was a type of unclassified wild animal who zigzagged through a world of cleverly laid cages. She was a mink that would never be a coat, she said of herself once before, perhaps inducing my cage analogy. It was not made to last, I knew. She had disappeared on me several times at bars. She was on drugs of all sorts that she never spoke of, and of which I never asked. She was a prostitute with a string of gentleman callers, as she called them, that would importune her at any and every hour. She was paying her rent selling herself to men for any reasonable offer. What I valued so dearly, men were getting on the cheap like peanut butter at Costco. I could have gone many more months or years avoiding that fact and refusing to make any judgments, but it became unavoidable. She said in order to make her art, the paintings she had dozens of throughout her apartment and hundreds she had given to friends or family, or the few she sold having rejected the idea that she would ever whore her art for money, she had to have time. And if she worked at a bank, or at a bar, or anywhere, the time she spent earning money to pay rent would be tenfold over what it took to have sex and be done with it. It would be less time she had to paint.

“At the expense of your soul,” I said at the end of one of our chapters. I often found myself chaptering our intermittent affair into six or seven incongruous chapters when I gave it thought, usually when I thought the last chapter had been written.  

“You can get souls at yardsales and thrifts, Norm,” she countered meekly. “They’re a dime a dozen. Like us. A dime a dozen. Feeling special is just another thinking error.”

I was particularly dismayed by that conversation. By that attitude. I knew she was more than she allowed herself to be, or maybe I was less than I pretended I was. And she reminded me of it. Made me face it. Shoved my nose in it. The sex had become spiritual though. It was in her apartment or my house. It was over a night, or a weekend, or a getaway to somewhere. And it had never before felt to me more like I was one with someone than I was with her. Whereas, at first it felt like she came sporadically like some demonic spirit when I mistakenly left the oracle on the Ouija board overnight, by the end she seemed to come even more intermittently, but more like a comet, or a rain squelching a drought, or like rescue breaths to that one suffocating being I felt we had become. A beast with two backs. Texts went unanswered, calls unreturned, messages unread for longer gaps of time until I decided to not try to reach her at all. It was the inevitable end of the Bubonic Plague, the Donner party wagon trail. She sunk my battleship.

Over a year and a half later, sometime in May, she came back. She texted me and we met in some motel she was staying at with no explanation given about what happened to her apartment. I had always thought that motels and hotels could be distinguished by levels. A motel being one floor and a hotel being anything that is two or more floors. Apparently, such is not the case because Motel 6 is two stories and calls itself a motel. Sitting in the parking lot, stalling, deciding whether I would go up to see her after all this time, trying to talk myself out of it, I discovered that it has nothing to do with levels at all. The difference is that a hotel is a building with interior corridors. The rooms are down hallways. Inside. Motels have outside-facing doors. Lodges are motels, but rustic in appearance. She texted me and said she saw my headlights as though that in some way obligated me to come up. She said please. Room 217. I miss you. Dot, dot, dot.

She had never expressed any sort of sentiment of the like before. Never said please. Nothing that could ever have been mistaken for being sweet, other than during the Christmas we spent together when she was like a different person. It was always something of affection, but not affection itself. Like a fake Christmas tree. There was no purity in it. I had inferred her feelings and blamed the inadequacy of her expression on her bounderish upbringing or my own zealousness and impatience for a return on my substantial emotional investment, if you will. I felt an uneasiness as I walked past the empty motel pool that was yet to be filled for the summer of weary travelers or displaced locals who hit bottom at a Motel 6. The pool was tarped the way yuppy hobby boats in posh harbors are tarped. I felt like a man walking the green mile, like Dorothy and all her compatriots in one body reluctantly staggering to the Wicked Witch’s castle after a broomstick. Or that ill-bred pit bulls would be uncaged at any moment and I would be at the mercy of their distempered jaws. It felt as though I was about to lose a kidney the way a security light flickered on me and seeing a Hispanic maintenance man quickly shut himself in a janitor’s closet, seemingly to avoid me. It felt like I was no longer in the city she lived in, where I worked, but on a foreign planet hostile to my kind. This is the way a deer must feel in the predatory woods. The mink that would become the coat.

The room was chaotic but smelled nice. There were trash bags full of clothes piled along the walls and articles of clothing that had escaped from the bags strewn across the floor and furniture. They looked like deserters shot. Cut in half by machine guns. The dresser under the flat screen TV was littered with makeup and a few candles. Some satanic symbolism, a dagger of some kind, ashes, loose change, wadded gobs of money, packs of cigarettes and a lighter with a hula girl painted on it and make-do ashtrays because no one has ashtrays anymore. Not like they used to. There were pills and empty baggies with chalkish residue and receipts and three or four cellphones, one appeared to be broken, and various charger cords that lied there like coiled sleeping snakes.

She didn’t look like she did when we met. She was a ghost of herself. The drugs had hollowed her face and her teeth were far less than perfect. She wore a black wig. Her eyes were more vacant and sunken and her skin that had once the purity of a talcum moonglow, was tainted by an uncleanly sallowness. I struggle to say an unkind word of her because my bias favors her, even in her obvious state of degeneration. But still she was beautiful standing there in knee highs and a t-shirt. That which I always favored. She came at me like a caged lioness goes for whatever she is being fed, instinctively perhaps, or trained. I stopped her and told her I had no offering, reasonable or otherwise, but she carried on. She took off the shirt and in the shadows of the room her stomach appeared larger than she could conceal. Perhaps, a few months earlier she could have fooled me, but it was past that time now. There was no fooling anyone, especially not herself. It is like one of those Greek tragedies. One of those unfortunate things that is both a curse and a blessing. It surprised me, though it shouldn’t. I guess I thought she would not have allowed it to get to the point that it was. That she would have a clinic on her saved phone contacts or that she would have done some Luciferian magic to rid her womb of the magical blessing of life. I couldn’t help but to think of her daughter, who she had only pictures of, one which was in a cheap frame by the bed.

We made love more sensually than ever. I held her stomach and it reminded me of holding a globe in a classroom as a kid. But it was softer. It was, in fact, a world of its own. And maybe I was feeling sentimental, but love seemed the perfect word for it. In a Motel 6 where hundreds if not thousands of other people had put on the same production. If these walls could talk, what stories they would tell. Those of a smut magazine. Those of Danielle Steele sultry supermarket pornography pulp that goes nicely with a red wine, chocolates and a sleeping husband. What would the walls say of us? Would they be given the back story, or would they just have to make do with what they could infer from the few words we exchanged with our mattress nuptials? They may have been surprised that unlike the last dozen men I left no money on the dresser when it was finished, or that after the moment that we both burst like rockets in ventricular fibrillation, I held her and spoke to her so softly that despite all their years of clandestine eavesdropping, they could not hear a word.

It was in that moment that I finally knew what I meant to her. That we were more than what I ever thought us to be, but less than what I had hoped we could be. Some things can never be the way you want them to be regardless of what sense it makes or how much you want it. We each wanted something in the other that neither of us had in ourselves. I figure she knew by then how I felt for her and all doubt, if ever that was the impediment, dissolved. She told me she blocked my number, which is why my calls and messages had not been returned for the past year and some months. Why, I asked. Because, she said. To be honest, you became too real and I’ve always preferred fiction.

“He is a boy,” she said as I rubbed her belly.

“Are you going to keep him?”

“Yeah. I think so,” she whispered back unsure.

“Are you with his dad?”

“No.”

“I’ll help you. With him. To keep him. I’ll help you.”

“Thank you.”

“I will.”

“I know.”

I am not sure the walls heard any of it, or if God or Satan heard, either, but when I felt she was satisfied in seeing me, that the unmeasurable reservoir had been adequately filled, I kissed her goodbye and left before I wore out my welcome. We didn’t talk about tomorrow. We never talked about tomorrow for that was some kind of unspoken curse. It was a time that didn’t exist for us until it was. The kiss stayed with me. It felt final, like a seal of some sort. A certification that the one soul we shared was no more. It was divorced or deceased. It was art, such that was on her canvases and in all her scattered-about sketchpads. That inexplicable thing that artists and writers alike all wish to capture in words or paint. What collectively becomes something on a shelf or on a wall, to be read or looked upon later but never lived again or adequately understood. I sat there in a deep state of reflection for about twenty minutes until a car pulled up and an older man got out and awkwardly walked to her room.

Days later I texted and called her to check on her and the baby, but didn’t get through. Maybe she blocked me again. I knew she had slid back into drug abuse, but I didn’t know if the baby was keeping her sober or if she was in so deep that she was using anyway. I didn’t know if she was someone else’s pregnancy fetish and funding her art by whoring herself still, as it appeared she was. If she was buying time turning tricks in seedy motels and in the backseat of her car or if she had stopped for the baby or some hidden dignity she suddenly found that had been misplaced in the wardrobe of many skins. Some soul she lost when she was a little girl which only got further and further from her as she grew. That which only she could find for herself. I could hope. I could pray. But somewhat selfishly, I mostly wondered if she thought of me.

About six months later, I was putting up Christmas lights on the house when a beat up car pulled up along the curb. The brakes squealed to a stop and it seemed to die there, the exhaust raising a fit at the behest of the exhausted engine. It wheezed and mewled even after it was turned off, shook, seized then quit. Some Toyota driven to hell and back. Neighbors, I presumed. It was a parade over there. I stopped for a moment and looked back to catch a glimpse of them as I was not immune to the sad voyeurism that afflicts others which I so expressly lampooned at the onset of this story. But rather than the white trash meth addict or the morbidly obese woman with five snotty kids in tow that I’ve come to expect, there she stood. Dressed much nicer than I ever recall, in ripped jeans and an oversized sweater with a new haircut. In tennis shoes. In the suburbs. She had remarkably remembered the way to my house and she had showed up. I stood on the ladder and looked at her without saying anything at all for a long moment. Then I thought of her in that Motel 6 when last I saw her. Her stomach. He would have been due around Halloween.

“Hello, Norm,” she said softly.

“Hey, Jenna.” I looked upon her and couldn’t speak for a moment. The words I wished to say, the question I wished to ask, wouldn’t come until some awkward seconds passed.

“You going to stare at me all day?” she smiled.

“What of the baby?” I finally asked, carefully stepping down from the ladder. A look of gravity washed over her pale face as she bit her lip. It appeared she had been off drugs and I couldn’t recall her looking as healthy as she did. She had gained a little much-needed weight and her eyes were full of life. Her teeth were fixed and her hair was her own. But at what expense, I feared. Had she ate her own. Cannibalized the child. Sacrificed him to Beelzebub with a coat hanger. Called a clinic. Took a pill. Shot up enough dope so that he flushed out a stillborn casualty of the evilness I overlooked. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe I just wanted to forget it all.

She opened the backdoor and there he was in the car seat, smiling. A beautiful boy. Big eyes and fat cheeks. Healthy and happy and cooing.

“I came hoping to go to that candlelit vigil. And maybe for some of those cookies. And maybe some of those gay movies, too,” she smiled. “And maybe to go to Olive Garden.”

“Satan celebrates Christmastime?”

“Well, Satan and I have a complicated relationship these days. I’m something of nothing anymore. Just floating along.”

“Can you stay through New Years?”

“Yeah,” she smiled, “We would like that. We’d like that very much. I have all the time in the world now.”   

“Good.”

“His name is Lucifer, you know,” she confessed as I helped her carry her things into the house.

I suppose I should have expected it, but I laughed and shook my head and exhaled like my father did whenever I said or did some asinine thing before he imparted upon me some sound fatherly advice.

“Well, we can call him Lou,” I returned.

“Lou?” she repeated. “I like that.”

“Sweet Lou. Named after a Harlem Globetrotter.”

She grinned, not stabbing me or anything anymore. I whistled Sweet Georgia Brown as I pushed that lucky pair of underwear deep into my pocket. There is a chance her car will not start after New Year’s. There is a very good chance it will not go anywhere for a long, long time.


That is where it ends. The last chapter. Where I would want it to end. But it doesn’t, really. I fell off the ladder and into the hollies, the string of lights still in my hands. My kid inside didn’t notice. He is playing a video game, waiting for our annual pilgrimage to get the tree. I turn to look at the jalopy that pulled up along the curb and it was a neighbor. How ever I conjured her beautiful image out that obscene surly rube, took quite the imagination. He is one of those people they make reality shows about. That people watch for pleasure. On disability and prescription pain pills. A social worker’s wet dream.

It wasn’t her. Like The Temptation’s beautiful song, it was just my imagination running away with me as it so often does. Bored in my cubicle at work. Looking at a wrecked Honda to write my assessment. Watching traffic move slowly past us, eyeballs scanning the scene for horror. It happens sometimes. Sometimes she comes back in about every way imaginable. Sometimes she is wearing sneakers. Other times sandals. It varies, but what never varies is the feeling in my heart when she does. That feeling of being resuscitated and no longer drowning. But sometimes she stays gone. I don’t know what happened to her or the boy and I don’t know that I ever will. I wonder as my son and I drive to the Christmas tree farm, looking out into the snow-covered farm fields that seem so vacant and woefully barren in December, if there is a canvas out there with something of me on it. Something of affection, that is. Then I wonder when another Siren will appear so that I will forget the last, or if I will ever find someone without having to breathe water.