Authors: Mark Nykanen
“Now, I can’t make you watch, but if I were you I would. I’d watch very carefully. What you’re about to see is your future, if you don’t cooperate with me, if you don’t follow
all
my instructions. And who knows?” I add blithely, “Maybe by watching you’ll figure out how to get out of here. Maybe I’ve
missed
something.”
“Yeah, and maybe she’s Anne Bancroft in
The Miracle Worker
,” Diamond Girl shakes her head at her mother, “but I don’t
think
so!”
She’s a pistol, and apparently a bit of a film buff to boot. Well, let’s see how she likes this one. Let’s see how they all like this one.
I dim the lights and turn on the tape, and as promised up pops Julie Andrews singing in
The Sound of Music
.
But then there’s a rough cut, if you’ll excuse the pun, and they’re no longer hearing the marvelous voice of Ms. Andrews but the screams, and they are chilling, of a young girl.
Family Planning #8
’s, as a matter of fact. Just a little younger than Diamond Girl. She’s strapped to a table, and she’s staring to the side. She pulls at the leather restraints, and each effort produces a show of muscle that I suspect only I am appreciating, though Sonny-boy’s eyes are wide open. Perhaps he’s never seen a naked girl, aside from his cellmates. I presume their bared flesh holds little interest for him, though there’s no telling with this family.
The camera looks down on her. The lighting is harsh (I’m no cinematographer), but the focus is good. And now the camera starts to tilt in the direction the girl is looking. Slowly, we begin to see that she’s watching another TV where the writhing figure of a woman lies on a stainless steel table beneath a cover of what appears to be green clay. It is, in fact, alginate, the gummy material dentists use to take an impression of teeth. The woman is choking to death; her ghastly green body has become one long spasm. Her grunts are extremely disturbing.
“There’s more to come,” I say with impressive eeriness. At least I think so, but Diamond Girl doesn’t miss a beat:
“Oooo,” she coos, “real spooky, dude. Can I go first,” she adds in a bored voice. “So I can get the fuck out of here.”
But she’s the only one talking. June, for once, is speechless. Jolly Roger stares at me, and Sonny-boy has lost all fascination with frontal nudity, and is crying again.
“That was her mom, right? The one that was choking.”
“That’s very observant of you, Diamond Girl.”
I can hear the wariness in my voice. She’s done this to me, made
me
wary. I don’t like that, not one bit, but I’m intrigued.
“So I’ll get to see something like that too?” She smiles at her mother, who isn’t looking; she’s leaning against the cage with her head down.
“Maybe I’ll make you go first, and let her watch,” I say.
“No,” she says, cocky as a one-eyed whore in the land of the blind (to give a new twist to an old line), “you’re not going to do that. You’re going to kill her first, then my dad, then my brother, and then you’re going to kill me.”
She’s right, but how does she know? I actually want to ask, but I’m not going to concede her anything. Then, as it turns out, I don’t have to because she says, “I know because that’s how I’d do it.”
I observe them for hours on a monitor in my bedroom. I have three cameras, two set into the walls and one in the ceiling right above them. I’m certain they haven’t noticed. There’s not that much to see; a camera’s eye is quite small, and the walls and ceiling are unfinished, rough in appearance.
But I see a great deal. June has just finished playing another in an interminable round of tic-tac-toe with Sonny-boy. This one went on for more than two hours of drawing Xs and Os in the dirt, then smoothing them over with her palms, playing without talking. They’ve been doing this for weeks.
Jolly Roger sits leaning against the wall most of the time, and when he does move he grips his lower back, like he’s got a disc out. He hasn’t complained, hasn’t said much of anything in days.
Diamond Girl watches her family as intensely as I do. When Jolly Roger tried to talk to her yesterday, she told him to “back off.”
I’ve caught her staring at the walls and ceiling too, as if she suspects that I’m watching; and after what she said about the order of death, I can’t help but wonder if she’s looking for the camera because she knows that she’d be watching too.
I’ve also become convinced that she’s trying to seduce me. I know that statement would probably raise a Duh! from her, it’s so obvious, what with her tongue on my hand in the van, and the way she went out of her way to expose herself in the kitty box when we first got down here. But even during the hours when I’m out of the cellar, I see the seduction in the way she moves. Sometimes she stretches, does a whole series of feline movements, and she’s always,
always
positioned for optimum exposure, whether it’s her ass rising up in the air when she’s on all fours, or her breasts thrusting into profile when she’s stretching her shoulders back.
After the first week, I became intrigued enough by her posturing to bring them all buckets of warm water, soap, and face cloths. Towels too. I set them within easy reach of the cage before retreating to my monitor up here in my bedroom.
First, June and Jolly Roger helped Sonny-boy clean himself up. Then they went to work on themselves, Jolly Roger in the bored, brusque motions of a man who’s past caring about his own stink, and June with the furious scrubbing of a penitent, a woman who hates her body and all that it has brought her, who wants nothing more from a bath than to scourge her own skin.
Their daughter waited till they stepped aside, then shed her clothes and washed herself without the least hint of self-consciousness.
I’ve given them buckets and washcloths every few days since, just for the joy of watching Diamond Girl. I’ve just done it again, and once more make myself comfortable in front of my monitor.
Diamond Girl strips off her top and pants as she has in the past. All very businesslike. But now she’s inching her panties down, as if the waistband were fraught with resistance, a motion that makes much of what is to come. It’s a tease, and it’s definitely different from what I’ve seen up till now. Maybe she really has figured out that I’m watching, and is taking full delight in my desire. I sit forward knowing I’d climb right inside that screen if I could.
When she does slide her panties past her pubis, she stops to scratch her dark patch idly, provocatively, her upper arms squeezing her breasts together with each movement, making them swell above her bra. I’m aroused by all of this, and filled with a heady sense of anticipation. I couldn’t take my eyes off her if the barn were burning down.
She’s still facing me when she bends over and slides her panties all the way off. Her hair falls forward, and for a moment she’s the picture of modesty; but then she straightens up quickly, sending it flying up over her head and onto her back. She reaches between the cups and unhooks her bra. But again, she moves slowly, her fingers lingering over their promise.
I’m not the only one noticing. Jolly Roger shows a keen interest too, the slob, and June tells him to look away. He raises his hands in surrender, as if he’s been caught, and as he turns around he forces Sonny-boy to do the same, on the theory, I suppose, that if he can’t watch, then justice cries out for a similar sacrifice on the part of his son.
June hisses at her daughter, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Diamond Girl ignores her, and with surprising grace reveals one breast and then the other.
June looks around, as if she suspects that Diamond Girl has an audience, then stares balefully at her. I’m staring too. It’s as if I’m seeing her breasts for the first time. They are so abundantly the breasts of a young girl, so taut, so forcefully forward in their trajectory. They have not suffered from children or time or weight gain and loss, the seesawing vicissitudes of most female flesh. They are … perfect … and pale, a pristine white with tiny nipples and a tan line that plummets between them to form a nearly perfect V that’s matched by the dark V down below, which lies in a field of white so alluring, so inviting, that I cannot look away. I find myself begging her, as I have each time she’s bathed, to turn around so I can see her bottom, which I have until this moment only glimpsed. And now, just when she does precisely what I wish, her goddamn mother picks up a towel. I curse the woman, would strike her dead this instant if doing so would preserve the vision I treasure; but June holds it between her daughter and the male members of her family, which does nothing to sully my view.
I’m mesmerized by the pale panty outline on Diamond Girl’s bottom. My breath is a veritable storm. She has satisfied my greatest desire so easily that it’s as if she can clearly see what I’m doing to myself.
She walks to the wall of the cage, her mother holding the towel beside her, reaches to the last of the buckets, and proceeds to wash herself thoroughly and without haste, pausing—yes, I’m certain of it—
pausing
over her pubis. She is not businesslike today. She is bold. She is brazen. She knows what she’s doing, she
knows
. She’s infecting me with richer and richer fantasies, and I have to fight the urge to yank her out of there. Already I spend too much time thinking of her, watching her. Last night I even dreamed of her. She had a child she’d named Baby Peach in a stroller, and she pushed it up to me.
“Baby Peach,” she whispered in my ear. Even in my sleep I felt her breath hot and moist.
Baby Peach? I thought but did not say.
“Yes, Baby Peach,” she said as if she’d heard me anyway.
Now she turns her bottom to me again and reaches back, scrubs and scrubs and scrubs, bringing the cloth up along the length of her crack, wringing the dirty water out and washing herself again, leaving herself pink where she had been pale.
To dream of her? I have never dreamed of them. Never. My dreams have never been troubled by such trifles. Now I want to kneel behind her and cup those cheeks with my hands, feel their fond firmness, their waves of warmth as I spread them cleanly. I want my tongue to tempt the sweetest heat she has to offer, to remain encircled while I inhale her every scent.
She has driven me to this. She is to die, but of course she’s right: she will be the last to go.
I turn from the screen as she bends over once more, fully displaying all that has inflamed me. I must clean up after myself, but even as I reach for the tissues I know that Diamond Girl’s display has not truly satisfied me. My thoughts, which rarely disturb my calm, are roiling with possibilities, none of them kind, not even by the standards that I enforce.
N
ORTHERN LIGHT GATHERED AS GENTLY
as a caftan around the empty vessel. Lauren stepped back, still studying the plaster finish, the wash of earthy pink and brown pigments. They were not unlike the hues outside her studio window, which faced the Angeles National Forest, an austere landscape hardly deserving of the name. She could see little more than a scattering of green out there, the desert bushes that managed to eke out enough moisture to survive, and on the hills beyond a risen trove of pines that bore only a bitter resemblance to their lofty cousins in the Northwest. The sun-baked trees appeared brittle, snappish in temperament, the stunted offspring of a sere land with strict demands.
She brushed her plastery hands against her jeans, took a deep breath, and turned away. The break between academic quarters was proving productive. She’d finished the last in the series with the funny French names. After this she had to move on. She wondered what the critics would say about this piece. She wished she didn’t care, but she did. Most of them had been kind to her work, even if the labels they’d used to describe it had been confusing at times.
ArtWeek
, for example, had called her last show “postmodern … minimalist … and feminist” all in a single sentence. Another critic had stroked her ego more directly by comparing her—and this came as a shock—to Henry Moore, one of the past century’s most esteemed sculptors, saying her vessels “with their primordial simplicity and rich interior existence echo the master’s own metaphors, even as they seek to invent a sensual language more appropriate to these less laden times.”
Whew! She’d had to take a breather after reading that review, and remind herself that it could be artistic death to believe your press notices. But
sensual language?
She had to admit she liked that one.
She needed a run, but knew better than to go out there at this hour. After ten
A.M
. the ozone count in the San Gabriel Valley generally rose to unhealthy levels, but she could not bear to stay inside a moment longer. Finishing a sculpture made her fidgety, anxious, ready to roar. And the skies looked clear; she’d felt a breeze earlier when she’d put seed out for the birds, so maybe some of the smog had been swept away. Maybe she could even avoid Chad, who had taken to coming home from work at odd hours to check on her in the studio. She didn’t need him to check on her. Didn’t
want
him to check on her, but that’s what he did every day, stopped by to see if she’d changed her mind, if she wanted a rapprochement, which would mean nothing more than a return to a physical relationship with no future.
Quickly, before he could show up, she pulled off her jeans, pleased to see how loosely they were fitting; all those miles were paying off. She slipped on running shorts, socks, shoes, and a sports bra, filled her water bottle, and stuffed it into a waist harness. She grabbed her sun visor on the way out, and jogged down the block to the entrance to the national forest.
The metal gate stood open, a space barely wide enough for the mountain biker who nodded to her as he snaked through it.
She reached up and gripped the fence, weighting her back and shoulder muscles, feeling them loosen, draining the tension from the hours she’d spent working in the studio. She devoted a few more minutes to stretching her quads and hamstrings, then started down the crumbling asphalt road that led away from the gate. The canyon walls on her left rose higher as she descended, filling the ravines and dry streambeds with shadows, the only coolness these stretches of rock and sand and parched scrub would likely know until the monsoon season returned, though it hadn’t done so for several years now.