Chapter 3 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 234, 000. The same number again. 234,000. Andre slammed the laptop shut, cutting off the conference, and gripped her head in her hands as tightly as she could. She pulled at her nail, until the corner ripped. She barely noticed. Howling in pain, she retreated to the couch and began sobbing. She felt sick; her forehead was feverish. Gripping her stomach, she ran to the wall and unplugged her phone. Rocking back and forth, she thought about vomiting, and then she reached into the howling, neutral wilderness of her mind, that beige desert afflicted with perpetual storms, and pulled out a shred of sanity. Getting in the shower, she held her head down between her knees and ran the cold water until she came to. Bandaging her finger and changing, she hurried to the living room. In the common space of her loft, she paced back and forth. She thought about jumping. Outside, the snowflakes had started falling. She could see 70 stories down to the sidewalk below. Suspended high in the sky, she felt like a snowflake too, cold, white, drifting. The city lights gleamed dully in her wide windows. The walls of her apartments were nothing but glass, and night rested inside them neatly. The firefly glow of the city did nothing to dispel the darkness. Snow was falling from an endlessly grey sky. Grey was everything. Endless, endless grey. She picked up the phone and called Meryl. The voicemail hadn’t changed; a somber, lawyerly voice informed her that Meryl was now an inmate of Rikers and could be found here between 5 and 6 pm; calling ahead of time was encouraged. Frustrated, she punched the numbers in again, and left a message this time. Meryl was in the process of being molested by a goblin. He was bending over her in a menacing fashion, wielding an enormous ax. Her scream reverberated, its echo bouncing off every single square inch of the unheated barn they were filming in. The corrugated tin roof tiles and metal rafters answered back, until the scream seemed to cancel itself out. The goblin continued roaring. She felt a real fear, and she expressed it, letting it slip as her shrieking lips widened into a very real grimace. Pushing her heaving bosom upwards, she let the creature pick her up and shake her like a puppy. He began to beat his chest, and lifted his ax. The blade! The blade was coming closer! SHHHEAAAAAA thunk! And with a metallic clang, the blade was stuck in her sternum, its handle poking up like a grisly candle on a birthday cake that, cleaved apart, was starting to cover the floor in blood. CUT! Yelling Rheims, the new director, who had attended some film school in Nevada where they made ITT commercials and who had re-named himself Rheims after moving to New York and taking up residency at a bar in the village where the forgotten Nuyorican population of Manhattan sometimes congregated to discuss the latest episode of Mad Men and the possibility of taking over Cuba. Meryl believed in the eerie and the curious. For example, her sister Autumn was a curiosity. What exactly is a rare mind? Is it schizophrenic? Is it BUILT differently? Is it incapable of aggression, and the other lizard instincts that keep the species multiplying? Is a rare mind a mind that can’t understand other minds, who is driven mad by the inane jibber jabber of the living, who, with their small triumphs and tragedies, buzz around like mosquitoes in the vast laboratories and libraries of, well, the minds of geniuses? Meryl, dyslexic, athletic, lazy, and pragmatic past the point where the definition of the word ends, believed that minds were sort of like ghost stories. There were scary ones, and then there were really scary ones, usually ones that involved lots and lots of children. Children of the Corn, for example, or Lord of the Flies. Andre, her cousin, for example, was a financial whiz with a mathematical mind that could see the fastest distance between two points in a nanosecond, or in .000000001 of the time that it took Meryl. Marla was a genius at finding subway stops, or dry-cleaners that specialized in crepe. Autumn was indeed terrifying; her inability to manufacture even five seconds of interest in anyone’s life but her own eluded even the most skilled psychiatrists that she’d been forced to go to the majority of her childhood, as her parents, ever vigilant, hyper-driven, had micro-managed and closely watched her EVERY WAKING SECOND, to be more than certain that they weren’t handling her incorrectly and that her exertion wouldn’t cost her later. Brilliant themselves, they, to the exclusion of every other activity, had curated and gardened Autumn’s mind to such a degree that her academic career, and the complicated maneuvers that had gotten her into and kept her in the best schools seemed cartoonish and childlike matter-of-fact rote tasks in comparison. The contests they’d discovered that she’d taken up as her hobby of her own volition, the media personalities she’d charmed and they had cultivated, and the drive Autumn had displayed naturally after being discovered had been eclipsed by Autumn’s progress herself, once she’d left grade school, and the relentless work that had separated her from the family entirely by high school. Meryl’s phone buzzed. Peeling off her stripper outfit (“Goblin Party” was the name of Rheim’s new movie), she changed quickly into jeans and a sweatshirt, then bundled up. Outside, it had stopped snowing, and as she stepped into the wet street, the streetlights seemed hallucinogenic. Meryl could be afraid because her imagination was so sensitive, so infinite, that to her, a goblin had really come into the club where she was stripping and murdered her mercilessly. It was all real to her, more real than possibility really could allow; it had been that way since she had been little. Feeling herself slip into the vast space of Manhattan as she walked away from the studio, the sky like the Milky Way itself above her, and herself weightless, as though she could drift away from earth at any second, she wrapped her hand around the phone in her pocket, and knowing somehow that it was Andre, called the number. “Meryl?” “Andre, what’s happening?” “Please come over -” “Did something happen to you?” “The money’s all gone, Meryl -” “What money?” The space on the line was as quiet as she imagined Pluto to be. “Say something, Andre.” “Every penny I ever made -” She looked at her watch, feeling a terrible desperation sweep over her. “I’m getting a cab. I’ll be there in five minutes. Don’t do anything.” “Meryl -” She hung up the phone, and ran to the other side of the street, hopping backwards as a cab came pulling up, jumping on the curb, screaming, “CAB! CAB!” until the man opened the door and she found herself at Andre’s.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 19:35:31 +0000
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