Happy People Live Here

9A

  In her apartment, Linda paced back and forth, almost wearing out the polish on her floors, desperately close to the television and pretending her shifting reflection was her favorite television show. The control was beside her, on the arm of her sofa, pointing at the television and with the channel up button, almost as worn as the polish neath her nervously shuffling feet.

  On the coffee table was a stack of newspapers and magazines. There was local and national and even international news too. There were newspapers from Sudan and Tikrit that she had imported once every couple of months. Then there were the gossip magazines, the kind with large breasted celebrities and their well to do boyfriends, photographed bare bottomed, climbing up the rafters of yachts and in rank admission, of the most dangerous and titillating liaisons. And there were the other kind of gossip magazines too, the ones where suited intellectuals hammered on over global politics while weighing in, like a pair of cement shoes, on important issues like Middle Eastern religious, political and economic agendas, from an entirely Western perspective.

  And the pile of news, it reached almost entirely to the ceiling, with so many pages, and so many important things that Linda had to know, that the world had to know. And the celebrity gossip was always changing and it was so hard to keep up with who was sleeping with who and the wars and economic disparity, it too was forever exchanging rounds, and like the opinions of its foreign correspondents, forever changing sides, and it was becoming so difficult for Linda to keep up, to know who to favor and who to address as a villain.

  Her fingers twitched, but not with childish anticipation, they twitched because of some nerve beneath her skin, or at the back of her brain, something of which she could not attend to with a scratching finger alone. And she knew, the only way to quiet this sensation, the only way to stop the creepy crawlies from creeping and crawling beneath her skin was to sit on her sofa with her fingers latched around her black remote, to turn on the evening news and to open a magazine or two or three or four, and to watch in horror and disbelief at a handful of heartbreaking tragedies and shattered innocence that, no matter how much she mourned and how destitute she became, she would never be able to mend, to stop from happening again or to understand how, in the world she lived, how this type of madness can even occur.

  And it would be that feeling, that final sense of disillusion with humanity, with society, with herself, that alone would be that feeling that she craved the most. It would be that moment, where she counted herself as whole and as nothing at the same moment. It would be where she blamed herself and others like her for the sadness and suffering in the world, crumpling up newspapers and hurling them at the screen.

  And when she felt it, she would crinkle and curl her lips and hurl insults, like the crumpled up newspaper, at her own reflection as she stared at her television screen, watching footage of charred smoke, rising from the war-torn ruins of an orphanage as below the footage, the future markets took a battering while commodities stayed firm, amidst rumors of impending trade embargos.

  And as the itch grew, commanded from somewhere in the middle of her back, somewhere that her stretching hands couldn’t attend, Linda stared at the stack of magazines and papers and then at the screen, like a vial of some scathing and loving drug. And then her eyes fell upon the black remote, her needle that fit like a tailored dress, into the palm of her hand, which took her away from her reality and whetted her senses in dire calamity.

  And the itch, it grew and it grew.

  Linda took the first magazine that she could reach. She fell onto her knees, grabbing manically at a black marker and swiping it across the title of the cover, erasing the name of the city being shelled and then erasing too, its face and the face of its martyrs and erasing too, the piles of rubble that buried tiny crooked hands. She swiped and she erased until there was nothing but a black page.

  She stared at the page and, like a sun being torn apart by a black hole, or like number line being divided by zero; the itch within her seemed to settle. It didn’t vanish entirely, not as quickly as it would if she were hearing the shelling and sounds of sirens sounding as vanned ambulances weaved their way through wrecks of burning vehicles and torn apart avenues. It dimmed, though, so her desire no longer pulled on her nerves like a setting anchor but instead, played like the faint echo of two lovers quarrelling, outside on the street, a block or two away.

  She could notice that it was there, begging her to turn on the television or to read the first line of a text. But this sun had been reduced to dwarfish rubble, its rasping aria, no louder than a whisper and no more potent than parting kiss on the turning of one’s cheek.

  But as quiet as it became, the sensation returned just as quick, so Linda opened the first page of the magazine, staring over its contents and reading each chapter, each story was like staring at a hundred colored pills and imagining their fantasy to the point of salivation.

  She took her black marker and she swiped it across the names of the stories and then she swiped it back across the names of the correspondents and the editors and the copywriters and the photographers and the publishers and even the contributors.

  And she stopped for a second, feeling the itch in the back of her head almost topple over so as to careen down to the tips of her toes. And like a starving beast, ravaging a weak and ensnared calf, she wrenched her face into a contorted grimace and she screeched and squealed as her tensing hand scratched the black marker over every word and every picture on the page, snuffing the inferno of disease and depression that scolded her giving heart and had her desperate and pining for more.

  Page after page she dragged her black marker around like a weapon. She felt in control. She felt, out of control. She felt like the child who had woken to find their captor asleep. And each page was like the cursing and devouring face of that captor and each swipe of her marker was like the swinging of some axing truncheon onto the chest and the belly, and the poking and tying hands, and then across the pleading and apologetic face of that son of a bitch. And she swiped and she scratched until every word was silenced, until there were no thoughts on the page, until the whole of what it was, returned to zero, unto which everything returned.

  And again, she paused and she felt calm.

  And she returned to every page of the magazine and then she threw the magazine to the floor and she grabbed a newspaper and she did the same, barely stopping to blink, to breath or to moisten her aridly cracking lips, blacking out every word and every image, laughing hysterically, unable to contain herself anymore.

  Page after page, paper after paper and magazine after magazine, everything was painted black. And the itch, it was buried under a new sensation, that of purging, of vomiting and shitting and pissing and crying and spitting – the ecstasy of expulsion.

  When all the magazines, when all the newspapers were like the black perceivable emptiness that was blanketed between the planets, Linda turned to the television and she drew her black marker over the screen until it was blacked out entirely.

  Then she looked around her apartment, feverish and famished for more. There on the dining table were pictures of her mother and her sisters and her nieces. And he dove through the air, her hand already outstretched, reaching for the frames with a crab-like pinch. And she ran the black marker over her mother’s face and her dress that she always wore and over the window in the background, of the room where she once slept. And she blacked out the mouth of her sister whose tongue could only fashion meddling and lies.

  And then she took her photograph of Mickey Mouse, and she blacked out his eyes.