Alice & Dorothy (26 page)

She could see Steve through one of the side windows, smoking a cigarette and watching television. Thanks to the yellow light of the flourescent bulbs that lit the office, however, Steve couldn’t see outside at all. The windows would look like blue-black sheets of plastic covering the glass from where he sat.

“
Tweedle - dee - dee
,” Alice said. “All alone, in need of some company.” She cocked her head as she watched him. The glass booth he was sitting in looked like a fishbowl, complete with lazy air bubbles and gulping, bug-eyed goldfish. Their heads were swollen with blood. Their eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and they looked like they might just fall out of their socket at any moment. They swam and gulped the water, and when their gills flashed they vented fans of bloody pus.

Steve seemed not to notice how sick the fish were. He was suddenly Steve the Diver, with an air hose rammed up his ass so he could swim up to the top of the bowl. Then he’d flop back down into his chair in front of the television. He had a pink
Fleshlight
in one hand and a spear in the other, only it wasn’t really a spear at all. It was more like a leg bone that had been ground down to a point on the business end by rubbing it on the sidewalk. The Fleshlight wasn’t pink latex; it had a real pussy on the end of it. Occasionally the pussy smiled, or lapped at its lips with a long slick tongue. It smiled and flashed more pottery teeth like the girl from the bathroom mirror. The sight of the lapping cunt filled Alice with a bile of rage.

I want to fuck your mouth
, Steve the Diver said.
Then you can blow your wad in my ass.
When he spoke, the words came out as pink and blue soap bubbles. As each one popped the sound traveled to Alice’s ears. One of the goldfish was shitting intestines out into the bowl, and as the free end of the fleshy tube drifted by Steve he suddenly reached out and clamped onto it with his teeth. The Fleshlight vanished from his hand and he began to suck the intestine like a cock, jerking it at the same time like a macabre porn star.

When the rotting goldfish above him started to cum, it bucked and shuddered. The way it was gulping made Alice think about biting Dorothy’s face while she slept, but then Steve was sucking the pus and blood out of the fish and taking it all, really sucking dick like a champ, gulping fish fluids down and letting some of it spill onto his face so it would be more sexy.

The goldfish buckled like a stomped tin can, and Steve the Diver was showered in little gold scales. They came to rest with the sound of hammer strikes and gunshots, but Steve didn’t seem to notice. He was watching television again, his diving costume gone, sipping hot tea and belching loudly.

Tweedle - dee - dee
, he belched.
Tweedle Dum. Make me cum
.

Alice walked to the front of the building and opened the door. The television was screeching static and jumbled nonsense she couldn’t understand; the pounding of steel on steel from the fish scales settled into a semi regular drumbeat. It took a moment for Alice to pick out a vocal line in all the shrieking, grating noise;
your hair wants to be cut, your hair wants to be cut
. It wanted to be cut, oh yes, and she was just the one to do the cutting. She didn’t have a knife, but she was sure Rabbit’s gun would do the trick. A girl could accomplish anything if she just put her mind to it, wasn’t that right? Anything at all. Of course, if her mind was someone else’s, well, all bets were off. May as well give her the gold medal ribbon and tell the other contestants to go home, because Alice had handed something over to a man truly capable of anything, and was about to show her just how capable.

Like cutting hair with a gun. Or sticking it in his ass to make him cum. The screeching television had been reduced to a steady
hyugh, hyugh, hyugh
, like the sound of a washer with a blanket in the spin cycle.

Alice walked up to the desk and planted a pink lipstick kiss on the glass. She caught sight of her reflection as she did. It was warbled and defiled, but there was no doubt that it wasn’t Alice. Alice was back in the room, sleeping off her dope high. Or she was tucked away safely in the back of her mind. The Hater was driving now. And he had some very specific ideas about how little girls were supposed to behave.

Steve looked up and smiled when he saw Alice.

Alice smiled back.

The next morning Dorothy woke before Alice and untangled herself from their ball of warmth in the middle of the bed. Her mouth was raw and fuzzy. She swished with some tap water in the bathroom then decided a shower might be in order. Her brain was coated with cobwebs and garden lattice from the drugs. Steaming hot water and packets of shampoo seemed like the perfect cure.

She turned the water on and the pipes groaned. She undressed and stepped into the tub. The fugue of the night before washed away from her skin under hot, soapy water, and soon was swirling around the rusting drain, gone forever. She tried to remember when exactly they had fallen asleep and found she couldn’t. There were little Polaroid images of them laying in the dark and talking, and snippets of conversation between episodes of smoking and resting. The heroin made her feel asleep and awake at the same time. Maybe she had dreamt the evening. Maybe she’d been awake all night.

One of the Polaroid flashes was of Dorothy admitting to faking her hospital tests. Guilt bloomed in her stomach. She would have never told Alice if they’d both been sober. The drugs had stripped her inhibitions away, however, and it had seemed a natural topic to discuss. She loved Alice. Love meant no secrets. She wanted to take that back now though, standing in the light of sobriety. She wondered if Alice might hate her for it, or think she was pathetic.

If Alice woke up and hated her, Dorothy would have no one to blame but herself. And what would she do? Alice would get dressed, tell her to fuck off, and probably head out on the road alone. She could picture the girl, face pink and flushed, blue eyes blazing and flaxen yellow hair dancing around her as she left a sobbing and begging Dorothy alone in the motel room. Dorothy’s makeup and nose would be running, and her simpering, blubbering noises of pity would make Alice hate her even more. Then she would get in Rabbit’s car, flip Dorothy off, and be gone forever while Dorothy stood alone in the rain.

Maybe Alice would spit on her before she left. Dorothy wouldn’t blame her. She was a weak and pitiful thing. An
ugly
thing. Nobody ever loved ugly. Dorothy started to cry, and lifted her face to the shower head. The movement was a familiar one. Letting the hot water pound her face while she wept would keep her tears from staining her face. It was a trick she’d learned early in her life and put to good use.

Thing was, she hadn’t lied about
everything
on those tests. Some things she’d been truthful about. She really did think the world was out to get her sometimes. It just felt like she was going to spend the rest of her life digging herself out of a hole left behind by her childhood. Random chance had taken her parents from her, left her scared and confused and terribly lonely. Aunt Emily and Uncle Henry had been nice enough, but taking kids in was their job, and with all those other needy hearts begging for attention her own little voice could get lost. She was just a paycheck, and that was that. Sure her dad and Uncle Henry had been war buddies, but when her dad died she saw the change come over Henry’s face, a change that said
you mean nothing more to me than how much the government will pay to keep you in food and clothes
.

So Dorothy started spending all her time in her room with her dolls, writing stories of distant lands and little girls who were unlikely heroes in their own little dramas. She started watching the Weather Channel and reading up on Tornados, and how they were a mix of different fronts crashing together. She saw the parallels to her life perfectly, and the more she watched those twisting balls of chaos on television the more sure she was about it.

By the time she stole the car and headed toward Kansas, she could almost tell herself Oz was out there waiting for her somewhere.

But of course, it was all a load of bullshit. Dr Weller had been right in his assessment of her; she’d been trying to kill herself. She’d just been able to rationalize it as a way to get to a magical land she’d made up on her own, and maybe that place existed because she thought about it enough and wished hard enough to make it so. Then again, maybe not.

If she’d been anyone else, a strong woman, like Alice, she would have never headed toward that tornado. She would have gone out on her own and made something of herself. But she had no direction and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do to make her life unfold the way it should. She supposed that was what marriage was for, so she could stay at home and be blissfully dependant on a man to make all her decisions for her. Do all her thinkin’, like a good woman was supposed to.

She couldn’t though, because she was young enough to believe love was the most important reason to get married and old enough to realize that being attracted to women was more than just confusion brought on by her sadness, like Pastor Dave had told her at confession, that it was who she was and it was about the only thing she was completely certain of.

Dorothy reached down for the bar of soap perched on the soap dish and let it drop down to the drain by her feet. The bottom of the soap was covered in a slick, lumpy red mess that ran clean in the shower. The water that had collected in the soap dish was pink and flecked more red. It was blood, and she knew it right away, the way you instinctively knew when a dog was wagging its tail but wasn’t being friendly, or how you could always tell when a spider was about to drop off the ceiling and land on you. Sometimes, you
just knew
. The soap had blood all over it.

She looked down at the little packs of shampoo and conditioner and saw they were torn open and used. The empty packs had been discarded. Had they not bothered to clean the suite before they rented it out? She hit the water and stepped out of the shower. She grabbed at the towels on the wall and found the top one damp. She picked it up and rubbed it between her fingers. There was more blood on the towel, washed pink with water.

The first thought that went through Dorothy’s head was that Alice was bleeding again, and maybe Rabbit had messed her up worse than she was letting on. And maybe she was not only hurt but possibly trying to
hide
it from Dorothy. Why would she? And if she was hiding this could she be hiding other things?

There was something on the mirror. Dorothy moved closer so she could see it better. There were lines coming up where the steam had clouded the mirror over, revealing what Dorothy thought looked like tiny pussies, and then quickly saw that they were eyes. In the center of the mirror was a big one, unlidded, glaring into the bathroom with the words
I AM ALWAYS WITH YOU
scrawled under it.

There’s no telling how long that has been there
was how her mind processed the image. These motels didn’t get cleaned too often from the looks of things, so that was certainly plausible. But how long would the oil from a fingertip last on a mirror so it would still affect the shower steam? Hours maybe. Not
days
.

Maybe it was just a cool art project Alice had done while waiting for her hair to dry. Maybe...but that didn’t quite sit with Dorothy either. She suddenly had a flash of their time in the hospital, right after Alice had woken up from the shot Dr Weller had given her to put her down, and Dorothy had started telling her about Oz. What had she called it?

“
...it’s like
duality
. Like two worlds overlapping each other. Like when two TV channels are coming in on the same station and you can see them both...”

She hadn’t paid attention when Alice had first said it, but what if Alice had been hinting at her own life and not relating to Dorothy’s troubles as she’d first thought? It made sense when Dorothy thought about what Alice had told her last night, about how she had pulled something through her dreams and it wouldn’t go back. She looked at the mirror again and a shiver of fear prickled her neck.
Is Alice truly crazy?

Then another thought popped into Dorothy’s mind.

Did it really matter?

A moment later:
No
. It didn’t really matter. It was the two of them against the world. That’s what mattered now. It wasn’t even a choice really; Dorothy’s heart had chosen for her already. She felt connected to Alice’s soul. Like they were extensions of each other. She wasn’t going to give that up for anything. And when people started looking for her, or the police came like Alice said, they’d just run away and find somewhere else to be happy. A home on the beach. Oz. It didn’t matter.

Like Alice had said:
The open road could be our plaything
. She liked the sound of that. Besides, Alice had saved her life in Rabbit’s house. Saved her from being raped. If Alice needed a little help now and then telling her fantasies from her realities, Dorothy could certainly help her with that. She was a bit of an expert, after all.