“Carla?” Susan says.
“I hate today. Anything I do is wrong.” Tears tremble in the scoops of Carla’s eyelashes. One falls, splats against a thumbnail the color of a robin’s egg, is atomized. More follow.
Everyone in the classroom continues to watch Carla Ribisi, even the professor. To defend Carla, Susan Falls glares at anyone who thinks she’s strong enough to stand the eye contact. It is a sacrifice. Susan also wants to watch Carla cry.
“Let’s leave,” Susan says.
“Really?” Carla wipes snot on the arm of the matching blue parka that she hasn’t yet removed. The parka’s shell is a shiny kind of nylon, iridescent, and the snot is clear and perfectly straight, like some three-inch pinstripe. It performs miracles of refraction with the fluorescent light particles that fall through the grids of the ceiling panels. Now Carla leans in close and whispers, “But,” and then she sees the line of snot. “God that’s gross. I’m so gross…” She snorts a giggle.
“But what?” Susan Falls says.
Carla, still whispering: “How will we get out of here?”
“Just pull my chair over and we’ll go.”
“Everyone’ll see.”
“Fuck them,” says Susan Falls. This is the first time, in her entire life, that she has employed an extra-cerebral profanity. Though in fantasy she has often used swear words, she has never spoken one. It feels good, and it occurs to Susan that, as stupid as most people sound when they use profanities, as stupid as she must have sounded just now, the feeling of power that just rushed through her, from inner labia to thyroglossal duct, the trace sensations leftover from just now, just now when she said the word fuck, make sounding stupid more than worthwhile.
“Fuck them, then,” Carla Ribisi agrees, and it is the hottest motherfucking thing Susan has ever heard.
CHAPTER 130,026
TWO BOUNCES IN LOGIC
Carla, eschewing the intricacies of the plan, crouches in front of Susan and, at the sign-language interpreter who is staring at her, makes this sound: “Tch.”
“Hook your arms around my neck,” Carla says.
“Really?” Susan says, but she’s hardly gotten it out before she’s in midair, her stumped thighs at Carla’s soft sides, under her unzipped parka. It is two steps to the wheelchair, and so two bounces, from which Susan deduces that the thing rubbing against her is a navel piercing.
“Okay,” says Carla. With one arm, she turns the wheelchair around, then lowers Susan into it, slowly, their bellybuttons meeting for a sliver of a second. “Do you need me to push you?”
“Not at all,” Susan says. She follows Carla out of the lecture hall.
“Nice knowing you, ladies,” says the professor.
CHAPTER 130,027
IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF LOGIC
“That guy’s such an asshole,” Carla says.
“He just wants to fuck you.”
“I think maybe he wants to fuck you.”
Susan’s first impulse is to insist that what Carla has just said is not true at all. Instead, she says, “He probably wants to fuck us both, simultaneously. If he had it his way, he’d have us from behind, have us each bent over his office desk. He’d slide his dick in and out of your pussy, so he could watch your beautiful ass twitch beneath his sloppy thrusting, and he’d keep his unclipped fingers rhythmlessly whittling away in me, so as not to obstruct the freak-show view of my lower half.”
Carla gasps and does a cat stretch. “That made me tingle, what you just said,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Susan Falls.”
“That’s a pretty name. You want to go somewhere and get really fucked up?”
“I have my Moderns in Paris seminar in an hour but… Fuck it. I was born to get really fucked up with you, Carla.”
CHAPTER 130,028
A DANCE, A DAMNED GOOD TIME TOGETHER
Carla rents a second-story room from a professor of music on 59th Street, just east of Ellis Avenue. The home is a standardly professorial Victorian, rampless. Carla wheels Susan through the alley and up to the garage. Punching out the command code on the number pad, Carla bounces a little and turns her head to smile at Susan, twice. “That’s my Ali Baba dance,” she says. The garage door opens. “Have you ever smoked opium?”
Susan considers telling a lie, but chooses not to. “No. Never.”
“Good,” Carla says. She wheels Susan into a corner of the garage and crouches down in front of the chair, the tip of her ponytail touching Susan’s half-lap. “Wrap around me,” Carla says. Susan obeys, lets her hands fall where they may on Carla’s chest. Carla stands up.
“You’re strong, Carla. How’d you get so strong?”
“I speedskate.”
Rather than remarking on any number of the positive effects that she imagines speedskating would have on the ass of Carla, Susan utters a simple “Wow,” but her face is pressed against Carla’s face, and she feels Carla’s face get hot, as if Susan had remarked on the likely effects of speedskating. Susan likes that.
Carla brings Susan up the stairs to her room. There aren’t any chairs. “Where do you want to be?”
“The bed’s fine. If you can get me somewhere near the headboard, so I could lean…” she is saying, but Carla is already getting her somewhere near the headboard so she can lean.
“Good?”
“Good.”
“How old are you, Susan?”
“What?”
“You seem older than most freshmen.”
“Actually, I’m fifteen.”
“Wow, you’re like one of these genius kids who basically skips high school, aren’t you?”
“Ah well…When you’re legless—”
“That’s really hot, Susan.”
CHAPTER 130,029
OPIUM
It doesn’t matter that the opium came as a gift from Dan Batner, this totally evil ex-boyfriend who Carla had met at an MBA mixer she’d accidentally wound up at last semester. It doesn’t matter that he gave it to her last week. His reason for giving it to her—to let her know that, had she not decided he was such an evil young man and then told him to stay away from her, she could have still been with the only opium dealer on campus, and likely the only opium dealer in the tristate area, had she not been so cold—doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, either, that the opium is not opium, but rather Nopium, an incense that Dan Batner mail-ordered for $19.99 per forty-ounce brick off an ad in the back of a glossy head magazine. Nor does it matter that the black brick of Nopium isn’t crumbly/gummy in the same way that opium is crumbly/gummy: doesn’t matter because any underclassman at the U of C who’d have researched opium’s texture on the internet—no U of C underclassmen had ever had opium in hand—would have only found words such as “crumbly/gummy” to describe opium’s texture, and words like “crumbly/gummy” could really mean anything within reason if you thought about them hard enough, anyway. Plus, Nopium smells like real opium, which is a smell that anyone anywhere in the world can become familiar with, as Carla and Susan have, by watching the movie The Wizard of Oz and imagining the smell Dorothy smelled when she fell into stuporous sleep in the field of poppies when the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Poppies, poppies,” and caressed the crystal ball with long-nailed and delicately fingered green hands while winged monkeys cheeped and yapped and giggled.
It doesn’t matter that Susan and Carla are smoking incense out of Carla’s color-morphing glass pipe, because even if it were real opium, Susan’s not inhaling it. She doesn’t know how. Inhaling vs. not-inhaling is not a dichotomy she is aware of. And even if she were inhaling real opium, it wouldn’t matter, because it is not the drug but the shared will to use the drug, to share the mouthpiece of a pipe, and to ditch class together, and drag ass across campus to Carla’s room, which smells like Carla’s hair, like almonds and autumn and soap, that matters. The undone inertia of unlikely emotion-laden circumstance, of tears and knocked-loose wheelchair brakes riding on th
e sound of blue nylon snowpant-legs rubbing one another is what matters.
“I’m so high, Carla,” Susan Falls says.
“So am I,” Carla says. They are stretched out on Carla’s double bed next to one another. “Since we’re both so high,” she says, “let’s pretend we’re not.”
“As you wish. You know, your room smells so good.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Hey, Carla. I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’s your major?”
“I’m undecided.”
“What between, Carla?”
“Between psychology and dropping out of college. I like the way you say my name all the time, Susan.”
“I think I want to drop out, too. Do you ever take those things off?”
Carla giggles.
“Do you?” Susan says.
“Are you coming on to me, little girl?”
“I’ve never come on to anyone before.”
“You want me to take them off?”
CHAPTER 130,030
A LEOPARD
Ten seconds later, Susan says, “No, not yet. Leave them on for a little while.”
“Do you smoke cigarettes, Susan?” Carla pulls a pack of Marlboros from a secret pocket inside her snowpants. “Here. Smoke this cigarette with me and tell me how you lost your legs.”
Susan drags on the cigarette, but, as with the opium, does not inhale. She says, “I’ll tell you, Carla.”
“Tell me.”
“It was a leopard. A leopard bit my legs in the jungle when I was an infant. I was lucky to survive. Gangrene set in, though, and they had to hack off my legs with a machete to prevent it from spreading.”
“A leopard?” Carla says. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. And I was an infant, so it wasn’t so much the leopard or the gangrene, I guess. An infant can’t watch out for—”
“Not to interrupt or be crude or anything, but this question just popped into my head, or maybe not, maybe it’s been in my head for a while, since because, you know, of what you said earlier, about the desk and everything, and us being high even though we’re pretending not to be high maybe provides me the space or excuse or whatever you want to call it to ask you this question, but are the workings of… Rather, can you—”
Carla is blushing.
“Blusher,” says Susan.
“Does your…”
“Yes. And I call it my naz-naz, which is Farsi. What do you call yours?”
Carla kisses her knuckles smackingly. “Tell me about your leopard,” she says.
“It might have been a car,” says Susan. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it was a car, and that’s what everyone tries to tell me, but I tend to doubt it was a car.”
“Why would they tell you it was a car if it wasn’t a car?”
“Any number of reasons. Maybe they do it for my benefit or maybe for my mother’s. If it was a car, then according to them I was trying to save my box turtle, Pedro, who I’d brought outside to play with, from being run over by the car. But I know otherwise. I know that if it was really a car, it was because Pedro was crushed, either accidentally or on purpose, while I tested the strength of his shell beneath the wheels of my mountain bike, and that Pedro’s death destroyed my will to live, so I threw myself into oncoming traffic with suicidal intent. That’s too ugly, though, so they say that I fell into the street while trying to save Pedro from being crushed by a car, because that way accidental circumstance—rather than I—can be blamed for my state of leglessness. That’s how the lie would benefit me. As well, it serves my mother on a couple levels—no mother can be expected to keep an eye on her thirteen-year-old daughter at all times, let alone control the pathway of a wayward box turtle or an oncoming car. However, a mother can and is expected both to keep her infant daughter off the floor of a jungle where hungry leopards live and to raise such a daughter not to have suicidal ideations at the age of thirteen.”
“Well, so wait,” Carla says, “do you have any memories of walking?”
“I have millions of memories of walking, but I also have memories of dreams, of flying.”
“Those were dreams, though.”
“But they feel similar enough, dreams and memories, that it wouldn’t be rigorous to trust the distinction.”
“What about photographs?”
“You can doctor those things,” says Susan. “It’s all beside the point, anyway. I’m legless. Hopefully I make up for it with brains.”
“You make up for it by a long shot,” whispers Carla. She is leaning over, separating Susan’s bangs with her thumbs. “Does your fancy brain make it up to you, though?” she says.
“Without my fancy brain, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Here where?”
“Here here. Let alone right here, able to demand you remove your snowpants.”
“I already said I would.”
“You said you would before I was in a position to demand it… This is a confusing courtship, at least in light of what I’ve read so far, but I know it wouldn’t be right unless there were a few feints before revelation. We can’t just have everything without complications, you and I. There’d be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we’d die unstoried deaths. My distant cousin invented a new and wholly novel egg dish that is probably extremely delicious and she can’t imagine its immediate success, even though most success, nowadays at least, tends to be immediate. She can’t see Eggs Jiselle becoming instantly famous. She sees an extended process where the name of the dish changes over a long stretch of time and respect slowly builds for her, and fame collects at the same turtle’s pace, and the Ritz begins serving Eggs Jiselle some ten years down the line, and ten years later Caesar’s Palace and Hotel Nikko, and even Spago eventually takes its own stab at the dish, adding rosemary or wasabi or something, and there’s a lawsuit over recipe patents or copyrights, which probably don’t even exist, but a struggle and a long time and a lot of effort, because if Jiselle imagined it otherwise, there’d be nothing to look forward to looking back on. So if without a story even the fame of an egg dish isn’t viable, then how about true love—it would be impossible.”
“What about first sight? There’s tons of stories about love at first sight.”
“In the good ones, though,” says Susan, “the love’s thwarted by outside forces. And if it isn’t, then death comes to one if not both of the lovers as soon as the love’s consummated.”
“So they never have the chance to betray one another. It’s merciful.”
“Not entirely, though. The one who lives, if one of them lives, ends up struggling to find meaning in a seemingly meaningl—”
“I don’t think this’ll kill you too fast, Susan.” Carla lowers her head, kisses Susan’s neck.
“If it doesn’t…killyoufast…it isn’t…true… I really should get… I have a presentation to make in Media Stud…”
“Are you dying?” Carla says.
“Yes, please.”
Carla gets off of Susan, removes her snowpants. She doesn’t have a big ass at all.
“You don’t have a big ass at all.”
“Would you have preferred a big ass?”
“I might have, but it doesn’t even matter. I’m impossibly dedicated to your true ass.”
“Have you ever had sex with a girl, Susan?”
“No, Carla, I haven’t even been kissed by anybody but you and my mom, and those kisses were so long ago, they might not have happened, even.”
“Do you want to smoke more opium before we do? To guarantee we’re high? It’ll thwart us sufficiently, I think. When we look back, we’ll have to worry about the possibility that it was the drug, rather than love, that allowed for the damned good time we’re about to have. We’ll have to meet again sober to find out for sure. But we’ll smoke more opium then, too, and every time after that, and so we’ll continue to worry and we’ll struggle and struggle, thwarted forever. You can’t doubt a plan that pretty, can you? I
sn’t it a pretty plan?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 130,031
NOT FRENCH
Jiselle and Susan are on opposite sides of the tiny balcony. A half-tempo electronic rendering of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is coming through the speakers of the box on the railing. At the end of the overture, Susan says, “Hey, Jiselle, can I borrow a cigarette?”
“Borrow a cigarette? What, are you gonna give it back to me when you’re done?”
Jiselle thinks this is awfully funny when, really, it’s just stupid fucking banter. On the other hand, Susan knows that one asks not to “borrow” a cigarette but rather to “bum” a cigarette for precisely the reason Jiselle has made salient.
Jiselle says, “When’d you start smoking fags, anyway?”
“This afternoon.”
“How’d you like the eggs?” Jiselle says.
“They were ungodly,” Susan says.
“They were not.”
“I didn’t actually get to eat them, but Jiselle, let me ask you. In terms of cousinhood, exactly how distant are we?”
Jiselle extends her arms as far as they’ll extend. “No blood,” she says.
“Wow, your armpits are shaved.”
“I’m British, Susan. I’m not French.”
“Neither am I. Fuck.” Susan puffs at her cigarette.
“Are you gonna inhale on the bloody thing or what?”
“What?”
Jiselle demonstrates.
Susan mimics, coughs, considers.
Her mind twirls at the thought of getting high on opium that never entered her system; at the thought of Adam distinguishing between himself and the world and its future and his own; the thought of a man, not yet slated to die, thinking to give seventy years away; of how to understand the difference between giving and having while alone and immortal in Eden. How you could mourn the end of something you never had a chance to take for granted.
Susan starts to shiver, and she shivers till she shakes, and it doesn’t let up when she flops out of her chair. It doesn’t let up when her ass hits the floor of the balcony, nor when the impact shocks her spine. Even after the back of her head strikes a corner of her wheelchair’s footrest, and even after the back of her head strikes the corner again, and her skull pushes in her brain, she doesn’t stop shaking, not for a full seven seconds.