I was, I really was. She was asking me to keep her from killing herself. There was no method chosen yet – it could have been slashing her wrists, or lying down on the train tracks outside of town (later she confessed that would never work, that she’d get up at the first tremor on the rail and run for her life, terrified that her feet would get tangled on the slats and her death would be classified as a mere accident – as if she were that careless and common), or just blowing her brains out with a polymer pistol – say, a Glock 19 – available at Wal-Mart or at half price from the same cretin who sold her cocaine.
“Hellooooo?”
“I hear you, I hear you,” I finally said. “Where are you?”
I left my VW Golf at home and took a cab to pick her up from some squalid blues bar, the only pale face in the place. The guy at the door – a black man old enough to have been an adolescent during the Civil Rights era, but raised with the polite deference of the previous generation – didn’t hide his relief when I grabbed my tattooed friend, threw her in her car, and took her home with me.
It was all I could think to do, and it made sense for both of us. Kimberle had been homeless, living out of her car – an antique Toyota Corolla that had had its lights punched out on too many occasions and now travelled unsteadily with huge swatches of duct tape holding up its fender. In all honesty, I was a bit unsteady myself, afflicted with the kind of loneliness that’s felt in the gut like a chronic and never fully realized nausea.
Also, it was fall – a particularly gorgeous time in Indiana, with its spray of colours on every tree but, in our town, one with a peculiar seasonal peril for college-aged girls. It seemed that about this time every year, there would be a disappearance – someone would fail to show at her dorm or study hall. This would be followed by a flowering of flyers on posts and bulletin boards (never trees) featuring a girl with a simple smile and a reward. Because the girl was always white and pointedly ordinary, there would be a strange familiarity about her. Everyone was sure they’d seen her at the Commons or the bookstore, waiting for the campus bus or at the Bluebird the previous weekend.
It may seem perverse to say this but every year, we waited for that disappearance, not in shock or horror, or to look for new clues to apprehend the culprit: we waited in anticipation of relief. Once the psycho got his girl, he seemed pacified, so we listened with a little less urgency to the footsteps behind us in the parking lot, worried less when out running at dawn. Spared, we would look guiltily at those flyers, which would be faded and torn by spring, when a farmer readying his corn field for planting would discover the girl among the papery remains of the previous year’s harvest.
When Kimberle moved in with me in November, the annual kill had not yet occurred and I was worried for both of us, her in her car and me in my first-floor one-bedroom, the window open for my cat, Brian Eno, to come and go as she pleased. I had trapped it so that it couldn’t be opened more than a few inches but that meant that it was never closed all the way, even in the worst of winter.
In my mind, Kimberle and I reeked of prey. We were both boyish girls, pink and sad. She wore straight blonde hair that moved in concert and had features angled to throw artful shadows; mine, by contrast, were soft and vaguely tropical, overwhelmed by a carnival of curls. We both seemed to be in weakened states. Her girlfriend had caught her in flagrante delicto and walked out; depression had swallowed her in the aftermath. She couldn’t concentrate at her restaurant job, mixing up simple orders, barking at the customers, so that it wasn’t long before she found herself at the unemployment office (where her insistence on stepping out to smoke cost her her place in line so many times she finally gave up).
It quickly followed that she went home one rosy dawn and discovered that her landlord, aware that he had no right to do so but convinced that Kimberle (now four months late on her rent) would never get it together to legally contest it, had stacked all her belongings on the sidewalk, where they had been picked over by the students at International House, headquarters for all the Third World kids on scholarships that barely covered textbooks. All that was left were a few T-shirts from various political marches (mostly black), books from her old and useless major in Marxist theory (one with a note in red tucked between its pages which read: “COMUNISM IS DEAD!”, which we marvelled at for its misspelling), and, to our surprise, her battered iBook (the screen was cracked though it worked fine).
Me, I’d just broken up with my boyfriend – it was my doing, it just felt like we were going nowhere – but I was past the point of righteousness and heavily into doubt. Not about my decision, that I never questioned. But about whether I’d ever care enough to understand another human being, whether I’d ever figure out how to stay after the initial flush, or whether I’d get over my absurd sense of self-sufficiency.
When I brought Kimberle to live with me she hadn’t replaced much of anything and we emptied the Toyota in one trip. I gave her my futon to sleep on in the living room, surrendered a drawer in the dresser, pushed my clothes to one side of the closet, and explained my alphabetized CDs, my work hours at a smokehouse one town over (and that we’d never starve for meat), and my books.
Since Kimberle had never visited me after I’d moved out of my parents’ house – in truth, we were more acquaintances than friends – I was especially emphatic about the books, prized possessions I’d been collecting since I had first earned a pay cheque. I pointed out the shelf of first editions, among them Richard Wright’s
Native Son
, Sapphire’s
American Dreams
, Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
, a rare copy of
The Cook and the Carpenter
, and Langston Hughes and Ben Carruthers’ limited-edition translations of Nicolas Guillén’s
Cuba Libre
, all encased in Saran Wrap. There were also a handful of ninteenth-century travel books on Cuba, fascinating for their racist assumptions, and a few autographed volumes, including novels by Dennis Cooper, Ana María Shua and Monique Wittig.
“These never leave the shelf, they never get unwrapped,” I said. “If you wanna read one of them, tell me and I’ll get you a copy, or xeroxes.”
“Cool,” she said in a disinterested whisper, pulling off her boots, long, sleek things that suggested she should be carrying a riding crop.
She leaned back on the futon in exhaustion and put her hands behind her head. There was an elegant and casual muscularity to her tattooed limbs, a pliability that I would later come to know under entirely different circumstances.
Kimberle had not been installed in my apartment more than a day or two (crying and sniffling, refusing to eat with the usual determination of the newly heartbroken) when I noticed that
Native Son
was gone, leaving a gaping hole on my shelf. I assumed that she’d taken it down to read in whatever second I had turned my back. I trotted over to the futon and peeked around and under the pillow. The sheets were neatly folded, the blanket too. Had anyone else been in the apartment except us two? No, not a soul, not even Brian Eno, who’d been out hunting. I contemplated my dilemma: how to ask a potential suicide if they’re ripping you off.
Sometime the next day – after a restless night of weeping and pillow punching which I could hear in the bedroom, even with the door closed – Kimberle managed to shower and put on a fresh black T, then lumbered into the kitchen. She barely nodded. It seemed that if she’d actually completed the gesture, her head might have been in danger of rolling off.
I suppose I should have been worried, given the threat of suicide so boldly announced, about Kimberle’s whereabouts when she wasn’t home. But I wasn’t, I wasn’t worried at all. I didn’t throw out my razors, I didn’t hide the belts, I didn’t turn off the pilot in the oven. It’s not that I didn’t think she was at risk, because I did, I absolutely did. It’s just that when she told me she needed to be stopped, I took it to mean she needed me to shelter her until she recovered, which I assumed would be soon. I thought, in fact, that I’d pretty much done my duty as a friend by bringing her home and feeding her a cherry-smoked ham sandwich.
Truth is, I was much more focused on the maniac whose quarry was still bounding out there in the wilderness. I would pull out the local print-only paper everyday when I got to the smokehouse and make for the police blotter. I knew, of course, that once the villain committed to the deed, it’d be front-page news, but I held out hope for clues from anticipatory crimes.
Once, there was an incident on a hiking trail, two girls were approached by a white man in his fifties, sallow and scurvy, who tried to grab one of them. The other girl turned out to be a member of the campus tae kwon do team and rapid-kicked his face before he somehow managed to get away. For several days after that, I was on the lookout for any man in his 50s who might come in to the smokehouse looking like tenderized meat. And I avoided all trails, even the carefully landscaped routes between campus buildings.
Because the smokehouse was isolated in order to realize its function, and its clientele fairly specialized – we sold gourmet meat (including bison, ostrich and alligator) mostly by phone and online, though our bestseller was summer sausage, as common in central Indiana as Oscar Mayer – there wasn’t much foot traffic in and out of the store and I actually spent a great deal of time alone. After I’d processed the orders, packed the UPS boxes, replenished and rearranged the display cases, made coffee and added some chips to the smoker, there wasn’t much for me to do but sit there, trying to study while avoiding giving too much importance to the noises outside that suggested furtive steps in the yard, or shadows that looked like bodies bent to hide below the window sill, just waiting for me to lift the frame and expose my neck for strangulation.
One evening, I came home to find Kimberle with my Santoku knife in hand, little pyramids of chopped onions, green pepper and slimy octopus arms with their puckering cups arranged on the counter. Brian Eno reached up from the floor, her calico belly and paws extended towards the heaven promised above.
“Dinner,” Kimberle announced as soon as I stepped in, lighting a flame under the wok.
I kicked my boots off, stripped my scarf from around my neck and let my coat slide from my body, all along yakking about the psychopath and his apparent disinterest this year.
“Maybe he finally died,” offered Kimberle.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought when we were about fifteen, ’cause it took until January that year, remember? But then I realized, it’s gotta be more than one guy,” I said.
“You think he’s got accomplices?” Kimberle asked, a tendril of smoke rising from the wok.
“Or copy cats,” I said. “I’m into the copy-cat theory.”
That’s about when I noticed Sapphire angling in unfamiliar fashion on the bookshelf. Woolf’s
Orlando
was no longer beside it. Had I considered what my reaction would have been any other time, I might have said rage. But seeing the jaunty leaning that suddenly gave the shelves a deliberately decorated look, I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. I was still catching my breath when I turned around and saw Kimberle. The Santoku had left her right hand, embedding its blade upright on the knuckles of her left. Blood seeped sparingly from between her fingers but collected quickly around the octopus pile, which now looked wounded and alive.
I took Kimberle to the county hospital, where they stitched the flaps of skin back together. Her hand, now bright and swollen like an aposematic amphibian, rested on the dashboard all the way home. We drove back in silence, her eyes closed, head inclined and threatening to hit the windshield.
In the kitchen, the onion and green pepper pyramids were intact on the counter but the octopus had vanished. Smudged paw tracks led out Brian Eno’s usual route through the living room window. Kimberle stood unsteadily under the light, her face shadowed. I sat down on the futon.
“What happened to
Native Son,
to
Orlando?”
I asked.
She shrugged.
“Did you take them?”
She spun, slowly, on the heel of her boot, dragging her other foot around in a circle.
“Kimberle . . .”
“I hurt,” she said, “I really hurt.” Her skin was a bluish red as she threw herself on my lap and bawled.
A week later,
Native Son
and
Orlando
were still missing but Kimberle and I hadn’t been able to talk about it. Our schedules failed to coincide and my mother, widowed and alone on the other side of town (confused but tolerant of my decision to live away from her), had gone to visit relatives in Miami, leaving me to deal with her cat, Brian Eno’s brother, a daring aerialist she’d named Alfredo Codona, after the Mexican trapeze artist who’d killed himself and his ex-wife. This complicated my life a bit more than usual, and I found myself drained after dealing with the temporarily housebound Alfredo, whose pent-up frustrations tended to result in toppled chairs, broken picture frames and a scattering of magazines and knick-knacks. It felt like I had to piece my mother’s place back together every single night she was gone.
One time, I was so tired when I got home I headed straight for the tub and finished undressing as the hot water nipped at my knees. I adjusted the temperature, then I let myself go under, blowing my breath out in fat, noisy bubbles. I came back up and didn’t bother to lift my lids. I used my toes to turn off the faucet, then went into a semi-somnambulist state in which neither my mother nor Alfredo Codona could engage me,
Native Son
and
Orlando
were back where they belonged, and Kimberle . . . Kimberle was . . .
laughing
.
“What . . .?”
I sat up, water splashing on the floor and on my clothes. I heard the refrigerator pop open, then tenebrous voices. I pulled the plug and gathered a towel around me but when I opened the door, I was startled by the blurry blackness of the living room. I heard rustling from the futon, conspiratorial giggling, and Brian Eno’s anxious meowing outside the unexpectedly closed window. To my amazement, Kimberle had brought somebody home. I didn’t especially like the idea of her having sex in my living room but we hadn’t talked about it – I’d assumed, since she was supposedly suicidal, that there wasn’t a need for that talk. Now I was trapped, naked and wet, watching Kimberle hovering above her lover, as agile as the real Alfredo Codona on the high wire.