..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Sunday, July 27, 2003

"I don't exist when you don't see me."
-Sisters of Mercy



FICTION:



Shades



Nikki was sure that one of them was watching her.

Even when she looked up as fast as she could, they were always looking down. She wondered what the odds were that they'd all be looking down. Wouldn't someone that wasn't watching her be looking at her now? Maybe they thought all her head-jerking was from sharp turns on the tracks. She missed her sunglasses. She knew that this wouldn't be happening if she had her sunglasses. She never should have gotten onto the subway without them, even if that had meant reaching into the toilet after them and letting that nasty water drip down her nose on her way out the door. She was amazed she'd never dropped them in there before, she was always moving so fast in the morning, it seemed like they always stayed on the top of her head through everything. Even when she bent down to flush, even when she bent down to shut the lid, even when she bent down to blow her nose into the water when she was out of tissues, even when she bent down real fast whenever she thought she saw something swimming around in it, they always stayed nested safely on the top over her head. Not today.

I'd rather be running around down here without shoes, instead of without my sunglasses, she thought. A little homeless piss between my toes, a little flinch whenever I put out someone's cigarette butt for them. You know, crushing a bug, even a bee, with your bare foot wouldn't be the worst thing you could step on down here. And maybe if I could get two bottle-caps to stick in my heels, the clicking would make people think I had shoes on anyway. No one ever looks down, not down here, except these fuckers . . .

She looked up so fast something in her neck popped. Every one of them was still looking down. Seven men - all sizes, most colors - lining the row across from her. She was alone. They seemed to be together. And even though she could only see around this one subway car, she was sure that there wasn't another girl on her side throughout this whole fucking train.

Nikki had an idea. She decided to yawn. A big long yawn, she'd hang it out there in the air with her eyes pinched shut. Anyone who was watching her wouldn't be able to resist it. He could be looking down all he wanted after she did it. It didn't matter, she'd see him yawn anyway, or, at least, trying not to. She'd see something, a muscle jumping on a jaw, a vein stand out on a throat, or maybe she'd even hear that seashell sound coming from him, the same sound that was always so loud in her own ears when she did it, maybe she'd hear something when he held it in. There would be something. And it would be her turn to stare at him. His eyes would have to be closed too.

No one yawns with their eyes open, do they? If they did, the eyes would be dead, looking nowhere. . .

She closed hers tight and opened up wide. For a crazy second she worried about how the spit looked when she felt some hanging from the roof of her mouth. She had to fake it for a moment, then the yawn went deep and opened up her throat and it turned into a real one. The seashell roar of the yawn in her head seemed so loud that she almost brought both her hands up to cover her ears. She cut it short, snapped her lips shut, and leaned back to count out some seconds in her head. Then she opened her eyes to see what she'd caught. And when she saw, her heart skipped and she almost ran right then.

Seven mouths stared back at her. Wide open and nasty. Baby birds waiting for her to vomit or drop bugs into them. She couldn't help herself, she went mouth to mouth, studying the insides while trying to slow her heart back down. Her watering eyes saw a long tongue yawning cat-style, some black cavities, some flashes of metal, the wrong color on one of the tongues, a neck flexing trying to keep his mouth closed, perfect teeth in one, "summer" teeth in another (some were here, some were there), extra teeth, shark teeth (so crooked they seemed to have two extra rows), a tattoo along the inside of the cheek? No, just an infection. Then she looked for the eyes.

One of them wasn't really yawning. His mouth was open and straining, blood raised in a pulsing vein in his neck, tongue creeping back, tonsils flexing, yet his eyes were still wide and aware, without that faraway look a yawn should have.

His eyes should have that cat-taking-a-shit look, she thought, That's what a yawn looks like. That's what his eyes are supposed to look like . Not like this . . .

He was watching her. She realized he was forcing his yawn too, he couldn't get a real one started no matter how hard he tried. She wasn't scared of him, she just suddenly needed to know why he was doing that. Why he thought she was doing that. She forgot about the rest of them, in her mind, they weren't all together anymore. Then the train jerked them all to one side as it stopped, and he was up and out the door first. He was up so fast, he moved faster than she ever did, even in the morning. It was just her and the baby birds trying to squeeze off the subway together. Once she was out and moving with the flow of bodies, another thought scared her even more than that row of desperate yearning mouths. She was suddenly sure that no one saw anything that she'd done, or worse, anything that she'd seen. She couldn't imagine what the odds were that they would all open their mouths at the same time. She tried to remember if there had been cameras on the train. She thought she'd heard somewhere that there were. Even if the cameras were watching everything, she imagined that the men were watching the screens, or the tapes, or looking through the mirrors, watching what happened on her train. They probably thought all the men were laughing from a joke she’d told. She wondered if the man who wasn’t laughing, the one who she knew wasn't really yawning, even showed up on their videotape.

Where did he go? She tried to move faster than the rest of the passengers. They seemed to notice her pushing and closed ranks. She used all her tricks, she got lower to the ground and got between everyone the same way she'd get out that door in time every morning without knocking everything over. Sometimes touching nothing except her key when she locked up and got out without looking, her momentum slamming the door behind her, no part of her body anywhere near it. She covered her eyes with her hand, squinting through her fingers, smelling the sweat and rubber from the long sticky train seat. There was finally some light coming down the tunnel to reach her. Even though she was still underground, Nikki could see a burning slice of the sun itself up there on the street, creeping between concrete and cars and dogs and the elbows and knees of everyone still under the road with her.

Away from the train, she ran for the sun.

Up on the street, she eventually slowed down when her legs got tired and her feet started slapping and she’d ran past the building where she worked. A “Don’t Walk” sign was flashing it’s warning across the street. It should say “Don’t Run” or “Run” in this city, she thought as she stood at the edge of the sidewalk, studying the mob waiting for the signal to cross. The girl in front of her had a tattoo on the small of her back. It peeked out at Nikki over a beltloop and she leaned in closer to read it. She told herself that, if the ink said, “Kilroy Was Here,” she was going to follow the girl to see where she went. Something to do to calm her down. Then the sign changed and the girl’s jeans flexed as she stepped onto the road and Nikki made out the words: “Lucky You.”

She turned another corner to keep moving. The sun that she’d ran so hard to find was in her eyes now, she needed a new street to get a new angle. She felt the burn and imagined a runner number on her forehead, climbing as her body temperature rose. She wondered if the sunlight traveled any faster through the eyes. She took a thick breath through her mouth and pinched her eyelids. She couldn’t recall sweating this early in the morning before today. She locked onto a man on the corner she was approaching. She walked up and looked down at what he was selling and then she remembered. She had weaved her way through his minefield of junk and boxes on other mornings, she’d just never looked up to see the man standing over them. Today she squinted at his black and gray beard that seemed to start just under his green eyes, and the stretched neck of his T-shirt hanging comfortably under his huge white smile and she decided to stop moving for a second and buy something.

What’s the odds of him selling sunglasses today? Or a Halloween mask would work. . .

First, there was a box full of phones. Not cell phones, or any part of a telephone that still had numbers, dials or buttons. Just loose receivers, ripped from their cradles or yanked off a payphone, all colors, all training frayed umbilical cords behind them. She picked one up and wiped at the mouthpiece with her thumb. She realizing that here were so many colors to choose from because he’d just painted them with a shell of thick latex paint, covering all the holes for the speakers and microphones. Maybe to smother a voice better than a secret whispered over the heel of any hand could. She laughed and dangled one in front of the man’s face as if he had a phone call. He explained that they could be used as candle-holders or conversation pieces, that they simply weren’t phones anymore. He told her that ninety-nine percent of those broken receivers were the end result of an argument during a phone call. He said that he could always tell when one was going to get ripped loose. He leaned in and told her that there was something in the voice at the end of the argument, when the caller wasn’t talking to the one on the line anymore, and they were shouting their last words for everyone to hear and that’s when the payphones got broke. And that’s where he’d come in. He said that, if she bought one, she could set one on top of her TV for someone to see, and make that story her own.

She nodded and frowned, believing his story until his last line. She hooded her eyes with her hand and turned from the sun. She’d ran to catch the damn thing just minutes earlier, and now she was wishing there was a hole and a ladder at her feet so she could get back underground. She’d rode the subway past her job before (blamed being late on the train and just worked half a day) just so she could watch everyone who got on and off. Of course, when she did that, she’d had the proper gear to cover her eyes.

She rattled another one of his boxes. She would have never considered buying sunglasses off a street corner before today. She decided that, if he actually had some ratty shades at the bottom or one of these boxes, even if he rambled some story about spray-painting the broken lenses after retrieving them from a lover’s quarrel, she would slap down a dollar bill and lock them back behind her ears anyway. Then she’d run back to the train that scared her out of the rabbit hole. The man noticed her hand over her eyes and returned the salute, snapping his heels together when he finished. He asked if she be interested in the speakers to a car stereo. She said that she didn’t have a car or the stereo to go with them. He said that she could carry all these things in her hands as she walked. He said it would keep strangers from talking to her, or from looking at her. Just like walking and reading a book, he decided. If you could do such a thing.

She froze for a moment and thought about what he’d just said. Then she shook it off and picked up a rain-soaked box next to her leg and watched the bottom split open. She jumped back as a pile of cracked and gutted videotapes spilled onto the sidewalk. She shook her head and asked the man why he’d bother to sell busted movies that no one could ever watch. She was sorry she asked that question before the last words even left her mouth. As he told another story, she rotated her body a quarter inch on her heels, to keep the sun’s glare directly on the back of her neck. And every few seconds, she scratched herself hard, over her shoulder and down her spine, where it was hardest to reach. She hated it when rolling sweat felt just like bugs back there. Sometimes she thought it was both. Or maybe bugs that were sweating right along with her.

He explained to her that there was a cockroach problem last summer, and none of the exterminators could figure out how to stop it. He swore that, on this block, none of the professionals, none of the government roach-killers that were flown in could do anything to stop the infestation. He told her that they would smoke-bomb the buildings, and the bugs would be gone for a while. Then, a couple weeks later, the roaches were back and drinking from the toilets again, like they’d never even left. He asked her if she knew who finally saved the day. She sighed and guessed it was him. Then she tuned another quarter inch away from the man and into the sun.

Impossible, she thought as she glared at the sky.

Her temperature rose and she felt a headache rooting in behind her eyes. How did the sun get over there. . .when it was just over there?

He agreed and took a little bow and admitted that yes, he was the hero. He said that he solved the mystery when he rented a certain tape from the neighborhood videostore, and it got stuck in his VCR. He said he returned the movie and never gave it another thought. Until the next day, when he heard a tiny rattle inside the machine and he hit the eject button and watched a roach run out. He said that he went back and rented that same movie again and then carefully took it apart with a hammer when he got home. He leaned forward and explained that the videotape wasn’t just crawling with roaches. He said that it was full of eggs too. Breeding all up and down the length of the movie, so they could be fed into someone else’s machine, slowly and carefully for th duration of a typical film’s hour and a half running time. He said it was a very popular action movie, with a twist at the end that people liked to watch over and over. And that explained how quickly the infestation would return.

She sighed loud for his benefit and said that she had to get going. Then she asked him to tell her, in ten words or less, to just answer her original question. Why did he think anyone would buy broken videotapes from him on a street corner? Before or after a story like that.

He shrugged and laughed and this time she saw bits of food in that wide white smile. He explained that she could use the parts and shells of the videotapes he was selling to make sure her movie rentals weren’t infected. He said that she could simply do a movie transplant before she took any strange tape into her house.

She could switch hearts, he said. He insisted that it was easy, that all she had to do was crack them open with a hammer and transfer the wheels from one movie to the other.

She said there were no houses in the city. Then she asked him how that would do any good, if the roach eggs were sprinkled along the movie tape itself. And she asked how anyone could do delicate surgery on a movie in street, and still have it play, without the proper tools. Like his hammer. He laughed and said those were all good points. He said that the cockroach story was actually someone else’s and that this pile of broken movies were actually porno films and then he asked if maybe she knew how to fix them. She sighed again, loud enough to cough at the end of it and started to walk away. She kicked over another wet box and a pile of headphones rolled over her shoes. Bent headsets trailing frayed copper with no machine or music attached. She kicked at the tumbleweed of wires to get loose and finally had to sit down and untangle her shoe. While she unwrapped her foot, she suddenly had an idea.

She interrupted the story he’d started telling (something about stumbling on a lost plane crash on his snowmoble, something about how all those headphones had miraculously survived and waited for him to find them, still attached to ears in a black long-dead cornfield of loose heads) and she asked him how much he wanted for the ones she was pulling off her foot like a lonely puppy at a pet store. He said three dollars. She said sold. Nikki blew the spiderwebs off the circles of foam and slid them up over her ears as she left the man behind. His story was smothered under the earphones, then gone as she walked on, letting the sun warm the side of her face. She’d stopped sweating.

Just like walking and reading a book, if you could do such a thing.

After a while, she passed a girl wearing a T-shirt that said, “Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Hello.” Nikki looked down at the baby she was carrying.

She should have a tattoo that says, “Killjoy Was Here” instead. Or “Lucky Me.” How come tattoos are never sarcastic? she thought as she caught the girls eyes. Then the girl turned away a spilt second before Nikki almost laughed in her face, or told her to turn that shirt inside out.

She thought about the first time she walked through those boxes on that corner. The man had been trying to sell her a broken garage door opener. He’d had a pile of them in a pillowcase, all shapes and colors. She wanted to ask how he could be selling those with out the garage doors to go with them. There was no way to ask the question, and to keep walking at the same time, so she slapped it out of the hand that was blocking her way and stopped him in the middle of his story and kicked the battery in front of her two more times as she walked.

Now she was thinking that it would be easy to sell one of those to a stranger. All she’d have to do is explain that all the remote controls actually work on all the garage doors in the world, and that’s the big secret that no one knows. They just make them look different around the same bundle of wires inside. She’d say that those things aren’t like a key at all. She thought back to when she was a little girl, riding the bus to school, and she was playing with the garage door opener her mother had given her in place of a house key. She was one of the first kids picked up in the morning and she’d always get bored fast. One day she started to point it out the window as they cruised the neighborhood. She’d squint her eyes so the other children thought she was sleeping, and click the button over and over and watched to see if any of the houses opened their garage doors and yawned when the bus went by. They never did. She always thought of the garage door as the mouth of the house. Once, after she’d given up trying, she did manage to send a yawn down the length of the bus. She waited until all the kids were on board and then faked a big one. She watched them watching her in the mirror over the driver’s head. She watched them trying not to do it, the muscles in some of their necks popping as they strained to keep their mouths shut. One day, it even went all the way to the back and too the front and even caught the driver off-guard. That’s when she forgot to stop the bus at a railroad crossing and Nikki was too scared to try that again. Sometimes she wondered if a carefully timed yawn, from a little girl in a back seat during heavy traffic would keep crossing the lanes back and forth and hover over the same spot for hours. She forgot to try that one.

Hell, I could sell garage door openers real easy. Just tell someone that, even if you live in the city, with no garage doors in sight, you could push the button up at the sky and imagine you’re opening up someone’s home. Or turning down the sunshine. Or, at least, changing the channel on their TV. Was he selling all these things back there?

She felt stronger somehow, with the metal ring of the headphones squeezing her head tighter than the sunglasses ever had. She tucked the end of the wire behind a button on her chest and walked faster. After crossing two more streets, she’d locked eyes with at least five people and they looked away first. She flinched as the gold metal flower at the end of the wire stung her chest. She looked for a subway sign and ran towards it with her hand over her ears. She felt the wire against her skin bite her again and she smiled. She imagined it was the sting of an insect trapped inside her sweat as it dried.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 3:54 PM [+] :::
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