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‘Just get rid of those tapes already, will you?’ I yelled at John, feeling half-embarrassed, half-proud from what Michael had just said. ‘I’m not your fucking eternal release.’
John nodded. He closed his eyes. Michael crack-toothed smiled at me. Lights flashed over his face, red and green.
‘Our Lady,’ Michael said, suddenly sitting up tall and looking around the club. ‘If I were to put on a play in which women had roles, I would insist that these roles be performed by adolescent boys and I would so inform the audience by means of a placard, which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets throughout the performance.’
I leaned down toward Michael and put my lips on his temple.
‘Our Lady,’ I whispered. Michael’s blood beat visibly there. He nodded and chewed on his bottom lip. ‘It’s really okay,’ I said. ‘Our good wishes are furtive and whispered, as, among others, those of proud servants and lepers must be.’
I turned to John, but he still wouldn’t look at me. He was sucking so hard on his cigarette that the filter got wrinkled.
Michael grabbed on to my wrist and dug his fingers in. It reminded me of Nadia grabbing my arm at the bar with Adi, so long ago.
Michael said my name desperately. ‘Mira, let’s read together, okay?’
I tried to smile. ‘I have to work,’ I said.
Then I went straight over to Adi, who welcomed me into her humping. I knew John would take a good look at me now. Me and Adi were fearsome, a tower, me pulling my shirt up, tits bare and jiggling, her squeezing me on top of a guy. I felt myself as pure sex power – hard and soft and completely plugged in. Adi’s rules of engagement had worked: I’d been a mirror with them, finally hard-edged and clear.
The next time I looked over, John and Michael were gone.
I climbed the rotting wooden stairs to the field where I’d been with Lani and Coco. I took off my shoes. Blood had run into them. I needed a patch wet with muddiness or dew. I got down on my knees and I dug through the grass. I got past the gravelly part until I struck mud, raking bugs, wrecking ant holes. I dug the ditch until I could feel up to my wrists, then my elbows, and I dug to my shoulder. Until I could’ve fallen in. I dropped Adi’s pillow in there. Mommy’s special pillow. I threw the ant-holed mud-wrecked earth on top. It was Adi who told me that all girls are whores. But only those who stay whores die.
I knew Michael lived in one of those massive high-rise buildings downtown. I’d gone with John to visit him once on the twenty-second floor. I remembered how his place had a mustard-coloured shag carpet and cubic glass fixtures from the seventies. It had smelled like John’s at Michael’s place, too, that one time we’d been: burnt vegetable oil and smoke on top of smoke.
I found Michael’s name on the directory, but it didn’t say the number of his place. I waited until a woman came out from the lobby. It was late but there was no security guard.
I took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. It smelled like pepperoni in the hallway. I heard an electronic beat, so many TVs.
I didn’t remember which door was his. The floor was a maze of brown and gold doors. I walked into dead ends, then retraced my steps. I passed the elevators at least three times.
When Gio had stopped the car in the middle of the road, before he pulled me out and after he’d yelled, it felt like this time with my father when I was twelve, when he’d picked me up from a sleepover at Nadia’s aunt’s place up north. I’d called him to get me because I felt so stressed out from the night that I just needed to be at home. But when we’d arrived, I wouldn’t get out of the car. It was early in the morning on a Sunday and I’d made it through the night, but I remember how my father yelled at me when I wouldn’t get out of the car; he used the same voice that he used with the dog. He was this strange man in our driveway yelling for my mother: ‘She won’t get out of the car! She won’t get out of the bloody car!’ My father’s dull body with his face full of hair, hair around his lips and a voice full of spite. He was a person with skin red from yelling. That was what I knew inside the car, with my legs squeezed together, with my mother running out in her bathrobe, at the car, leaning in: ‘What’s wrong with you, Mira?’
My mother spoke to my father with hoarseness in her throat. She said, ‘Go in the house. Everything’s fine.’
My mother told my father I was fine.
With my mother’s head poking back into the car, her coffee breath, it was easy enough to get out.
‘What is it, Mira?’ She said something like that. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Sighing. ‘I’m sure there’s a reason for this.’
My mother put her arm around me even though I felt too old for hugs. We walked slowly to the house. We walked slowly up the stairs. It was all too gloomy between my mother and me, when I should have laughed, I was on the verge.
Nadia’s aunt and boyfriend had been having sex through the walls all night. Her aunt was an alcoholic who had given me and Nadia our first beers. There was this choked sound or a pop. I’d never heard sounds like the sounds that she made that night, all night, and I thought she could’ve been dead and I wanted to wake Nadia up but I was too scared. I wanted to go home, I just wanted my home.
Back at home, though, when I was twelve, when my father yelled for my mother because I wouldn’t get out of the car, I knew for certain that something was wrong. Something was fucked between women and men. I knew it because of the way that Nadia’s aunt acted like nothing was wrong in the morning light. I knew it when Nadia joked with her aunt. I knew because of how my mother looked at me after she told my father that everything was fine. I knew that both of them believed now that something wasn’t fine but neither of them knew exactly what it was. Or exactly how to talk to me ever again.
The problem with my father yelling and the problem with my mother’s gloom and the fucked-up problem between men and women, between me and Ezrah and every man I’d ever known, was that I knew right now – the problem was mine.
I slid away like a snake from my home. Because what my parents thought about me was true. What your parents think about you is true! What your father thinks, what your mother thinks, all of it is perfectly true. Your body is helpless so far from the ground as you grow. You’re see-through and flimsy and if you don’t slide away, slither, then you’ll stay and you’ll lie and have your head filled with their shit.
When a girl’s body is just starting to be formed, people teach her to ignore the men in the street. Just ignore and ignore and all will be fine. If there’s a buzzing in your pants, don’t say a word. Even if something cracks loudly in your head, some rotting fence about to fall over, don’t say a word, because everything’s fine.
But sometimes some things need to be said!
All great whores become pure, Gio said.
I knocked on Michael’s brown painted door with key scratches in the centre. I had to knock ten times, loud, because of the drum noise pounding.
