Outside, Brian Eno wailed, tapping her paws on the glass. I shrugged, as if she could understand, but all she did was unleash an even more high-pitched scream. It was raining outside. I held tight to the towel and started across the room as quietly as I could. But as I tried to open the window, I felt a hand on my ankle. Its warmth rose up my leg, infused my gut and became a knot in my throat. I looked down and saw Kimberle’s arm, its jagged tattoos pulsing. Rather than jerk away, I bent to undo her fingers, only to find myself face to face with her. Her lips were glistening, and below her chin was a milky slope with a puckered nipple . . . she moved to make room for me as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know how or why but my mouth opened to the stranger’s breast, tasting her and the vague tobacco of Kimberle’s spit.
Afterwards, as Kimberle and I sprawled on either side of the girl, I recognized her as a clerk from a bookstore in town. She seemed dazed and pleased, her shoulder up against Kimberle as she stroked my belly. I realized that for the last hour or so, as engaged as we’d been in this most intimate of manoeuvres, Kimberle and I had not kissed or otherwise touched. We had worked side by side, a hyaloid membrane – structureless and free.
“Here, banana boat queen,” Kimberle said with a sly grin as she passed me a joint.
Banana boat queen?
And I thought: Where the fuck did she get that? How the hell did she think she’d earned dispensation for that?
The girl between us bristled.
Then Kimberle laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said to our guest, “I can do that; she and I go back.”
In all honesty, I don’t know when I met Kimberle. It seemed she had always been there, from the very day we arrived from Cuba. Hers was a mysterious and solitary world. I realized that one winter day in my junior year, as I was walking home from school just as dusk was settling in. Kimberle pulled her Toyota next to me and asked if I wanted a ride. As soon as I got in, she offered me a cigarette. I said no.
“A disgusting habit anyway. You wanna see something?”
“What?”
Without another word, Kimberle aimed the Toyota out of town, past the last deadbeat bar, the strip malls and the trailer parks, past the ramp to the interstate, until she entered a narrow gravel road with corn blossoming on either side. There was a brackish smell, the tang of wet dirt and nicotine. The Toyota danced on the gravel but Kimberle, bent over the wheel, maintained a determined expression.
“Are you ready?”
“Ready . . .? For what?” I asked, my fingers clutching the shoulder belt.
“This,” she whispered. Then she turned off the headlights.
Before I had a chance to adjust to the tracers, she gunned the car, hurling it down the black tunnel, the tyres spitting rocks as she swirled this way and that, following the eerie spotlight provided by the moon . . . for a moment, we were suspended in air and time. My life did not pass in front of my eyes how I might have expected; instead, I saw images of desperate people on a bounding sea; multitudes wandering Fifth Avenue or the Thames, the shores of the Bosporus or the sands outside the pyramids; mirrors and mirrors, mercury and water; a family portrait in Havana from years before; my mother with her tangled hair, my father tilting his hat in New Orleans or Galveston; the shadows of birds of paradise against a stucco wall; a shallow and watery grave, then another longer passage, a trail of bones. Just then the silver etched the sharp edges of the corn stalks, teasing them to life as spectres in black coats . . .
“We’re going to die!” I screamed.
Moments later, the Toyota came to a shaky stop as we both gasped for breath. A cloud of smoke surrounded us, reeking of fermentation and gasoline. I popped open the door and crawled outside, where I promptly threw up.
Kimberle scrambled over the seat and out, practically on top of me. Her arms held me steady. “You OK?” she asked, panting.
“That was amazing,” I said, my heart still racing, “just amazing.”
Not even a week had gone by when Kimberle brought another girl home, this time an Eastern European professor who’d been implicated with a Cuban during a semester abroad in Bucharest. Rather than wait for me to stumble on to them, they had marched right in to my bedroom, naked as newborns. I was going to protest but was too unnerved by their boldness and then, in my weakness, seduced by the silky warmth of skin on either side of me. Seconds later, I felt something hard and cold against my belly and looked down to see Kimberle wearing a harness with a summer sausage dangling from it. The professor sighed as I guided the meat. As she licked and bit at my chin, Kimberle pushed inch by sitophilic inch into her. At one point, Kimberle was balanced above me, her mouth grazing mine, but we just stared past each other.
Afterwards – the professor between us – we luxuriated, the room redolent of garlic, pepper and sweat. “Quite the little Cuban sandwich we’ve got here,” Kimberle said, passing me what now seemed like the obligatory after-sex joint followed by the vaguely racist comment. The professor stiffened. Like the bookstore girl, she’d turned her back to Kimberle. Instead of rubbing my belly, this one settled her head on my shoulder, then fell happily asleep.
“Kimberle, you’ve gotta stop,” I said. I hesitated. “I’ve gotta get my books back. Do you understand me?”
Her head was buried under the pillow on the futon, the early morning light shiny on her exposed shoulder blade. With the white sheet crumbled halfway up her back, she looked like a headless angel.
“Kimberle, are you listening to me?” There was some imperceptible movement, a twitch. “Would you please . . . I’m talking to you.”
She emerged, curtain of yellow hair, eyes smoky. “What makes you think I took them?”
“What . . .? Are you kidding me?”
“Coulda been the bookstore girl, or the professor.”
Since the ménage, the bookstore girl had called to invite me to dinner but I had declined. And the professor had stopped by twice, once with a first edition of Upton Sinclair’s
Mental Radio.
Tempting – achingly tempting – as that 1930 oddity was, I had refused it.
“I’ll let Kimberle know you stopped by,” I’d added, biting my lip.
“I didn’t come to see Kimberle,” the professor had said, her fingers pulling on my curls, which I’d found disconcerting.
Kimberle was looking at me now, waiting for an answer. “My books were missing before the bookstore girl and the professor,” I said.
“Oh.”
“We’ve got to talk about that too.”
Down went her head. “Now?” she asked her voice distant and flimsy like a final communication from a sinking ship.
“Now.”
She hopped up, her hip bones pure cartilage. She shivered. “I’ll be right back,” she said, headed for the bathroom. I dropped on the futon, heard her pee into the bowl, then the water running. I scanned the shelf, imagining where
Mental Radio
might have fit. Silence.
Then: “Kimberle? Kimberle, you all right?” I scrambled to the bathroom, struggled with the knob. “Kimberle, please, let me in,” I pleaded, imagining her hanging from the light fixture, her veins cascading red into the tub, that polymer pistol bought just for this moment, when she’d stick its tip in her mouth and . . . “Kimberle, goddamn it . . .” Then I kicked, kicked and kicked again, until the lock bent and the door gave. “Kimberle . . .” But there was nothing, just my breath misting as I stared at the open window, the screen leaning against the tub.
I ran out and around our building but there was no sign of her, no imprint I could find in the snow, nothing. When I tried to start my car to look for her, the engine sputtered and died. I grabbed Kimberle’s keys to the Toyota, which came to life mockingly, and put it into reverse, only to have to brake immediately to avoid a passing station. The Toyota jerked, the duct-taped fender shifted, practically falling, while I white-knuckled the wheel and felt my heart like a reciprocating engine in my chest.
After that, I made sure we spent as much time together as possible: reading, running, cooking venison I brought from the smokehouse, stuffing it with currants, pecans and pears, or making smoked bison burgers with Vidalia onions and thyme. On any given night, she’d bring home a different girl to whom we’d minister with increasing aerial expertise. At some point I noticed
American Dreams
was missing from the shelf but I no longer cared.
One night in late January – our local psychopath still loose, still victimless – I came home from the smokehouse emanating a barosmic mesquite and found a naked Kimberle eagerly waiting for me.
“A surprise, a surprise tonight,” she said, helping me with my coat. “Oh my God, you smell . . .
sooooo
good.”
She led me to my room, where a clearly anxious, very pregnant woman was sitting up in my bed.
“Whoa, Kimberle, I . . .”
“Hi,” the woman said hoarsely; she was terrified. She was holding the sheet to her ample breasts. I could see giant areolae through the threads, the giant slope of her belly.
“This’ll be great, I promise,” Kimberle whispered, pushing me towards the bed as she tugged on my sweater.
“I dunno . . . I . . .”
Before long Kimberle was driving my hand inside the woman, who barely moved as she begged us to kiss, to please kiss for her.
“I need, I need to see that . . .”
I turned to Kimberle but she was intent on the task at hand. Inside the pregnant woman, my fingers took the measure of what felt like a fetal skull, baby teeth, a rope of blood. Suddenly, the pregnant woman began to sob and I pulled out, flustered and confused. I grabbed my clothes off the floor and started out of the room when I felt something soft and squishy under my bare foot. I bent down to discover a half-eaten field mouse, a bloody offering from Brian Eno, who batted it at me, her fangs exposed and feral.
I climbed in my VW and after cranking it a while managed to get it started. I steered out of town, past the strip malls, the corn fields and the interstate where, years before, Kimberle had made me feel so fucking alive. When I got to the smokehouse, I scaled up a back-room bunk my boss used when he stayed to smoke delicate meats overnight – it was infused with a smell of acrid flesh and maleness. Outside, I could hear branches breaking, footsteps, an owl. I refused to consider the shadows on the curtainless window. The blanket scratched my skin, the walls whined. Trembling there in the dark, I realized I wanted to kiss Kimberle – not for anyone else’s pleasure but for my own.
The next morning, there was an ice storm and my car once more refused to start. I called Kimberle and asked her to pick me up at the smokehouse. When the Toyota pulled into the driveway, I jumped in before Kimberle had the chance to park. I leaned towards her but she turned away.
“I’m sorry about last night, I really am,” she said, all skittish, avoiding eye contact.
“Me too.” The Toyota’s tyres spun on the ice for an instant then got traction and heaved on to the road. “What was going on with your friend?”
“I dunno. She went home. I said I’d take her but she just refused.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Can I . . .? Look, it was just fun . . . I dunno why everything got so screwed up.”
I put my head against the frosty passenger window. “What would make you think that would be fun?”
“I just thought we could, you know, do something . . .
different.
Don’t you wanna just do something different now and again? I mean . . . if there’s something you wanted to do, I’d consider it.”
As soon as she said it, I knew: “I wanna do a threesome with a guy.”
“With . . . with a
guy
?”
“Why not?”
Kimberle was so taken aback, she momentarily lost control. The car slid on the shoulder then skidded back on to the road.
“But . . . wha—I mean, what would I do?”
“What do you think?”
“Look, I’m not gonna . . . and he’d want us to . . .” She kept looking from me to the road, each curve back to town now a little slicker, less certain.
I nodded at her, exasperated, as if she were some dumb puppy. “Well, exactly.”
“Exactly? But . . .”
“Kimberle, don’t you ever think about what we’re doing – about
us
?”
“Us? There is no
us
.”
She fell on the brake just as we hurled beyond the asphalt but the resistance was catalytic: the car twirled a double ocho as the rear tyres hit the road again. My life such as it was – my widowed mother, my useless Cuban passport, the smoke in my lungs, the ache in my chest that seemed impossible to contain – burned through me. We flipped twice and landed in a labyrinth of pointy corn stalks peppered by a sooty snow. There was a moment of silence, a stillness, then the tape ripped and the Toyota’s front end collapsed, shaking us one more time.
“Are you . . . Are you OK?” I asked breathlessly. I was hanging upside down.
The car was on its back. In a second,
Native Son, Orlando
and
American Dreams
slipped from under the seats, which were now above our heads, and tumbled to the ceiling below us. They were in Saran Wrap, encased in blue and copper like monarch chrysalids.
“Oh God . . . Kimberle . . .” I started to sob softly.
Kimberle shook her head, sprinkling a bloody constellation on the windshield. I reached over and undid her seat belt, which caused her body to drop with a thud. She tried to help me with mine but it was stuck.
“Let me crawl out and come around,” she said, her mouth a mess of red. Her fingers felt around for teeth, for pieces of tongue.
I watched as she kicked out the glass on her window, picked each shard from the frame and slowly pulled herself through. My head throbbed and I closed my eyes. I could hear the crunch of Kimberle’s steps on the snow, the exertion in her breathing. I heard her gasp and choke and then a rustling by my window.
“Don’t look,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached in to cover my eyes with her ensanguined hands, “don’t look.”
But it was too late: there, above her shoulder, was this year’s seasonal kill, waxy and white but for the purple areolae and the meat of her sex. She was ordinary, familiar, and the glass of her eyes captured a portrait of Kimberle and me.