Blue Field(5)

She eagerly choked back a plug of snot. But, she said. What about Greg?

Greg who she liked to think of as Some-Greg, had been her friend’s recent-at-the-time ex-ex. For a while, he’d also been her own. Suddenly she was not beyond imagining. Desire like melt, river runs throating deep-cut banks. A cock-salty, scorched-caramel scent to the stirring breeze. She was so there. And then she wasn’t, her friend having paused long enough in the conversation for her to think the connection was a wash. Sleet pinged her windshield and she could hardly see. Her parents were still utterly recently dead. She considered yanking the car around at the first turn-off and heading back in the smoldering vile cold to the scene of the final break. She might never leave.

But her pal’s voice suddenly resurfaced. You know Greg, she said. Greg is Greg.

Small world. Idiot world. Where was that turn-off? She transponded through a checkpoint, swung the wheel, gassed hard. Her car fishtailed then righted itself and she shot past all the fantabulous snow-wreathed digi-boards crowning the side of the road. Eat Here. Eat This.

God, her friend said after a moment’s silence. I’m so sorry. Just listen to me.

Now, in the whack heat of late October, she nosed her car back along the cemetery’s drive to the entrance. Still more listening to do. Still more amends to make, on her part and on her friend’s too. But just before the main road she pulled over and got out. She washed her hands at the pump dedicated to some loved-one’s memory and shook them dry. The sky had smogged over again. No sign of the white dots massing above. Once again her superpower, such as it was—to see the mostly unseen, to picture the body’s inner dramas, her own version of watching and guarding—seemed blindingly flawed. Some power—what good had it done her parents in the end? Sometimes, when she momentarily forgot herself in her work, she’d suddenly snap back to this question. Worse, she’d imagine her parents asking the same question from beyond the grave, her mother a bewildered, sorrowful mist, her father a band pressed around her own chest or thighs. At least they were there, she thought as she shut her car’s door and released the handbrake. At least they were still with her in whatever way they could be. Until this past week, when she’d bailed on them, or they on her.

You’d forget your own head, her mother used to tell her daughter. You’d forget if it wasn’t screwed on so tight.

Turn signal on, she buzzed her window down. She could puke for guilt.





5


You’re late, her friend Jane said.

She clutched her soda and slumped into a seat in the subterranean food court. Guilty as charged. She should have taken the subway after her meetings and debarked at her far station to board a private U!-shuttle. Having conducted her rituals, she could have swiftly returned, nursing a vitamin cocktail. Instead she’d grown increasingly woozy in her shushing sedan. The sky had darkened without warning and rain quick-silvered her windshield, transforming dips in the road to brimming goblets of mercury. Beautiful poison. She’d fought to keep her eyes open. Her ears rang. And now in Old Downtown—on the lowest concourse of a series of marble-columned malls that brambled beneath huge tracts of real estate—she felt sick. Just talking might kill her. Then again—she hazarded a glance and noted the swirling gold flecks in Jane’s green irises—not talking might also kill.

Sorry, she finally said.

Jane jacked her elbows onto the table and rammed her fingers through her ice-pale hair. Her wide cheekbones and high forehead appeared glazed under the fluorescents. You and me both, she said. Dear Marilyn, you don’t need to go there nearly every single day. I don’t mean to be mean, but it’s not like they’re going anywhere.

Snick-snick—guilt and guilt. To cover, Marilyn sipped her drink. The over-lit concourse shrilled with laughter and reeked of rancid oil. Suit-clad men and women poured off the down escalator and flooded the concessions, though a few loose-limbed tee-shirted teenagers managed to crest through. So many so bright with hunger. She knuckled her eyes and wedged some soothing darkness in. She pinched her nostrils shut with her thumb and forefinger. A few claustrophobic seconds and she let go.

So? Jane said, launching an impatient, sculling motion with her hands. How come so out of touch?

Marilyn drank some more. Bottomless thirst. Just as, momentarily restored at her parents’ graves today, she’d felt drained and lost once she’d turned onto the road. Very lost.

Don’t think you’re boring me, Jane continued—though already she seemed to be sighting the salad of shop signs in Franglish and Korean and Farsi that marked the bustling booths. Her narrow lips held the faint, aeons-familiar curl. Smile? Sneer? You’re not boring me yet, she added, then offered a regal yawn.

A pang sat Marilyn upright. She liked to believe that if someone slit her open, inside might nest a near-semblance of her friend. Her Jane-twin. As kids on sleepovers at each other’s houses, they’d fit like cut-outs, breathing each other’s exhale. It seemed charged with the chlorophyll scent of frog-spawn that bolted in springtime from the banks of the forbidden creek—the waterway where on soggy fall days after school the terrible-twosome tormented muskrats into sewer pipes like the one in which Jane’s older sister once paid them a dime to initiate them out of their knit tights and underpants so she could examine their girl parts. Years later there were the occasional boyfriends occasionally shared. The shared experience of bullshit jobs better than no jobs. Eventually better jobs and eventually even better-than-bullshit jobs.