Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (16 page)

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to tell him about what is happening to me, the way the world is narrowing in, but what he’s told me gives me chills. C and I don’t talk about ourselves, not exactly.

We talk about his pictures.

We tell funny stories about our childhoods, but only the stories that could be from anyone’s childhood.

We tell each other where to put our hands.

All of it, by mutual agreement, though I know the online anonymity is only respectful deference on his part.

If I asked, we’d meet, we’d be more than pictures and stories. I don’t ask.

So I don’t say that the pictures make me genuinely uneasy and tell him why. Instead I write that
they’re a little spooky, almost
.

I’ve been kind of obsessed, lately, with what we
see
versus what we’re looking at. What do you mean?

You can look at anything, direct your vision at any part of the world around you, but it doesn’t mean you actually see anything. Notice it, think about it, take it in. I’ve just been thinking, lately, for lots of reasons, a few of them personal, that maybe it’s not really the mechanics or objective quality of the looking that’s important, but what is actually seen and noticed. I took these pictures with an oatmeal container. Objectively, much worse equipment than I’m used to. But my fancy camera would never have captured this image, isn’t even capable of
seeing
this image. Two cameras, pointed in the
same direction, at the same thing. The pinhole camera really “sees” the library, I think
.

These pictures
are
beautiful. The marble of the columns looks so tactile, almost like bone.

The pictures remind me, too, of the field of vision under a scope, how the dark circle around what you’ve focused on just bleeds out into infinity while you look at what’s right in front you, centered on the slide.

They remind me of me, of course, though my loss of vision at the edges isn’t some dark ring I can see, it’s just what isn’t there.

I can’t tell him any of this.

How do you get the pictures out of the oatmeal container? I have to develop the film I put inside
.

Like, with a red lightbulb and the basins of chemicals and stuff?

Yeah, but I don’t have a special darkroom because everything’s digital nowadays. I just develop them in my bathroom. But I still screw in a red lightbulb
.

That is very cool. It’s too bad that’s not the moment where the murderer’s face is revealed in movies, anymore
.

Ha! True. Yet something else technology has stolen
.

I smile, ready to play. I toggle away from his library pictures, though.

I print out C’s pictures, sometimes, to pin up by my kitchen sink, or in my office, and maybe I’ll someday want to look at these again, print them out, they’re so beautiful, after all.

Not yet, though.

Instead, C and I walk into a dark room together.

I beckon him, respond,

Exactly, because it was always kind of sexy, too. Or, it seemed like there were a lot of hard-bitten detectives and their pretty clients all close together in the tiny darkroom, waiting for the picture to magically develop in the basin thing, slooshing it around with the tong things, glancing deep into each other’s eyes trying to deny the inevitable
.

That the murderer was SOMEONE SHE KNEW?

No, that the hard-bitten detective and his pretty client were IN LOVE. And also, that it was SOMEONE SHE KNEW
.

Are you looking for a re-creation?

Of the darkroom scene?

Let me turn out the lights. Turn out yours, too
.

I don’t have to, I’ve already turned out the lights. I balance my laptop on a stiff sofa pillow and lean against the back, ask him.

Who gets to be the hard-bitten detective?

You can. I’ll work on being unwittingly irresistible
.

When I first started exchanging messages with C, we were careful and polite. Friendly. I liked his pictures. He liked what I had to say about them. I sometimes scroll through our saved chats trying to pinpoint where the turn was, when we started playing, when we said something that led to our teasing the other about where our hands were when they weren’t on the keyboard.

It’s impossible to say how it happened.

A zillion harmless words between two strangers keeping the other company, and then a night with a handful of reckless words.

It had felt so good.

It was a risk I could take.

Did you?
he had asked.

I did, did you?
I had answered.

Yes
, he’d said.

And then we weren’t strangers, not exactly, but I didn’t tell my mom about him, either.

You’ve got that covered
, I answer, pulling open the knot on my drawstring pajamas.
You’re so irresistible I’m already tucking your hair behind your ears, clenching my fists to keep from touching you
.

Where do you want to touch me?

Where are you touching yourself?

I’ve been touching myself since you said that darkrooms are kind of sexy. Now I’m hard, and I hate stopping to write, but I don’t want to stop what we’re doing
.

I’ve never done anything like this before, cybering, cybering with a stranger, role-play cybering with a stranger. Then again, there isn’t anything I recognize about my life anymore, so why not?

Why not grab another pillow and push it between my legs so I have something to kind of roll against while I tell him how to hold himself tight at the base, and then rub his thumb over the top because when I write that, when I imagine it, it makes my clit feel three sizes too big and wet besides and that’s about a thousand times better than feeling afraid or lonely or angry.

Now faster. Lick your palm if you need to
.

He doesn’t answer, but that’s how I know he’s listening.

I’ve always been clumsy.

Five-seven-and-a-half is nothing to sneeze at, and by the time I was in high school I had the kind of hips that managed to find the corners of tables, doorjambs, and knickknacks balanced on decorative surfaces, such was their breadth.

The top half took after my hips, as Mom said, and I learned to keep water glasses at the twelve o’clock position of my plate, to lean forward when eating popcorn or anything sauce-laden, and that I would always have to brace my arm across my chest when going up and down the stairs. To reduce bounce and because it’s easy to lose track of your feet.

Oh, also, my ass. Who knows where that’s ended up, exactly. It’s made its own fabulous place in the world.

The summer before I moved here, Mom and I had laughed over the increase in my ungainly stumbles and butterfingers, chalking it up to nerves over moving so far away.

It seemed normal that I would spend the summer tripping and walking into walls, like my subconscious trying to say that I still needed my mom, or something.

When I got here in the late summer, I found out I had to take a driver’s test to get an Ohio driver’s license as I had accidentally let my Washington license expire. On the freeway just south of the university, with the officer from the DMV in my car, I got into an accident while changing lanes.

Thank God it was a sleepy, late Tuesday morning before classes were in session. I was going slow, too, because of a work zone. It still makes me so thankful that I get shaky to remember that no one was hurt. The officer was kind and perfect and talked me through breathing out my sobs.

I couldn’t tell them how it happened. At all.

My certainty that my lane was clear felt bone deep, and because it was a test, I was on alert. I had checked my mirrors, and my blind spots, and there was nothing there,
except, there was.

A landscaping pickup truck with a huge neon green decal over the side.

I had stood in the shoulder of the freeway and looked at that huge green sticker on that big truck and I knew I hadn’t seen that truck. Then, there was this whoosh of knowledge that came over me, made me get chills even though it was August, and so hot and muggy on the shoulder of the freeway that we were all sweating through our clothes.

I hadn’t
seen
that truck.

I’d never been to the eye doctor. At all my physicals, when they do the thing where they make you look at the letters?

Twenty-twenty, every time.

I’d never been to the eye doctor, but then I ended up going to so many, that August and September, I’ve lost count.

Retinitis pigmentosa.

Now, it’s just December, and I lean against the cold window of the bus and watch brand-new snowflakes swirl in the icy breeze. We haven’t had a really good snow yet, one that’s left behind a lot of inches, and I’m looking forward to it because they’re rare in the Northwest.

I’ve been told it’s actually kind of a crapshoot that December will bring a bunch of snow to Ohio, but the natives keep telling me we’re due for a white Christmas, and so I’m hoping.

There are only a few little snowflakes now, but even a handful of snowflakes, spread out in the wind all over a big city, still means it’s
snowing
.

Snowfall.

Even though the vision I have left is twenty-twenty, my visual field has narrowed, and my night vision is grainy with little acuity and full of interlocking halos radiating from artificial light sources.

I can see, but I am told my diagnosis means I’m going blind.

It’s like how at first, when a snowflake finds its way to rest on the pointed top of a fence board, melting a little because it is all by itself, we say it is snowing, but everything in our neighborhood still looks the same.

The pointy boards of the fence still point, the bare trees zigzag their branches all across the pale sky, all the patio furniture we never bothered to bring in is still exposed on its lonely patio.

Then, three or four new snowflakes join their pioneer on the fence, and because they can huddle together for cold, they don’t melt. They can make a little cold spot for another three snowflakes, until there is a soft pile, like spilled sugar.

One snowflake at a time, the pointy boards of the fence grow soft, the branches of the trees round with drifts, the patio furniture disappears into white and indistinct humps and caves.

I draw a six-pointed snowflake in the fog of my breath on the bus window.

One snowflake at a time for the world you thought knew to transform.

Unrecognizable.

At first, it’s snowing, and then, while you aren’t looking, snowfall.

The world you knew is still there, but it’s hidden.

Campus and home have been enough, for me, this winter
. I wrote to C, last night, curled in the dark, his words glowing under the glass of my screen.

He wants to know why I’m not getting out more. Why I’m always available to chat in the evenings. He isn’t, always, and then he’ll tell me about a concert I had vaguely heard about, or some community locavore dinner, or a movie.

Sometimes, Bob or one of my other lab colleagues will invite me out at the end of the day. I got a lot of invitations, at first. Which, actually, I’m surprised how many I turned down. I like bars. I like people. I like outdoor concerts and cookouts and trying new restaurants. Mom and I had a membership to all the museums in Seattle, the zoo even, just so we could go whenever we felt like it and see one thing.

Sometimes you just want to look at lemurs. Or one Monet. Or sit in a listening booth at the Experience Music Project and try to figure out Bob Dylan. Which is impossible, by the way.

Everyone has told me that there is a good museum here. C went to the Rothko exhibit, the Andy Warhol one, too, with the giant, silver, balloon clouds.

The closest C and I ever got to meeting each other was when an Annie Leibovitz installation came to the gallery on campus, hundreds of her photographs and serials of her proofs, and for several breath-holding minutes, we talked in hypotheticals about that installation because, of course, meeting on campus was nothing.

Safe as houses.

It was photography, and we talked about his pictures all the time.

Then, the hypotheticals drifted away, scrolled up the screen, and disappeared.

He didn’t talk about the installation, later, after he had surely been to see it.

As if we had stood the other up and couldn’t speak of it, when really, I had not let him quite ask me so that I wouldn’t have to either reject him or accept.

He knows I am a new member of the Lakefield State research faculty, but that’s all. He hasn’t asked what I research and I haven’t told him. I know he works somewhere on campus, and that he likes his job, but he hasn’t told me what it is.

Or at least, I change the subject when I’m worried he’s getting close to saying something that will release him from my computer.

He wants to know why I’m not comfortable going out, and because I won’t tell him, he worries it’s because I’m shy or not adjusting well.

Because we don’t really talk about
our day
, not exactly.

More and more, he’s told me about these things that he’s done—the concerts and the new restaurants, and the events.

When he does, I try to get him to talk about his photographs. Or I tell him the room is dark.

I don’t tell him exactly how dark it gets, nowadays, how that scares me. How I’ll look at the time on the laptop again and again, certain it must be later, and it’s still early and I’ll realize, looking at the living-room windows and the giant halo around them, the distorted ring my night blindness refracts a light source into, that there is still enough residual evening light that I should be able to see better.

I don’t tell him that I take one bus line, the one that I worry about missing, every morning, because it’s the line without any transfers and I’m not sure about transfers yet. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, terrified I’ve overslept and I’m going to miss that bus.

I don’t tell him that I get all of my groceries at the corner store three straight blocks from my house. Or that my whole life I was a vegetarian, but it’s too hard to find good options at the corner store so I’ve started eating meat again.