Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

He didn’t answer but his smile was resplendent.

“I need you to tell me,” I said, even though I was mostly sure that he wasn’t there.

Stopping at the next red light I turned my head to regard him.

His race was indiscernible, nonexistent among the varieties of men. He was a god, perfection, as real as the sky and as distant.

A sexual friction was rising in my lower abdomen. It was slick and bloody, vibrating at an incredible, feathery rate. It was the feeling I had for Theon when I was living at his place but we had not yet become lovers.

His interim girlfriend had been Venus Moxie, a frequent costar in his various films. They would do lines of coke and fuck in the living room where I watched TV. Theon would have his eyes on me while Venus rode his incessant erection.

I loved the attention. It made me feel that he belonged to me even if he was with her.

A horn honked loudly and I realized that I’d drifted out of my lane.

I pulled to the curb on Motor and took in deep breaths. Suicide was semitransparent there next to me. Theon and Venus were memories threatening to become real in the backseat. My fingers were numb, my wrists were burning, and I felt like I did just before stupid Myron Palmer made me come.

Everything was sex: the soles of my feet, the crazy bone in my left elbow, the smell of my sweat and perfume. I wanted to get down on my knees and have some nameless, tattooed biker fuck me with his bent dick. I wanted Suicide to take me without having to give him a thing.

Was that possible?

I pulled up in front of the lime-green bungalow on Darton Street just as the sun kissed the horizon. The sky had turned an iridescent orange and black from the sunset, cloud cover, and air pollution. On the way I had to pull my car to the curb eight times to avoid losing control.

I wanted to die but every time I imagined it a sexual tension ignited in me and the wish for death turned into a need for sex. This agony was exquisite and depleting. It took a quarter of an hour to climb out of the car and go to the door of the small house.

“Mama!” Edison yelled as he flung the door open.

I dropped to my knees and he rushed into my arms. I held on to him as if he were a single jutting stone in the middle of the ocean and I was a drowning woman fresh from a shipwreck.

“How are you, baby?” I asked.

He squeezed me for an answer.

“Did you save your mama something to eat?”

“Come on,” he said.

He took me by the hand and dragged me into the manicured living room. Delilah wore a cranberry pantsuit, standing there like a saleswoman for a well-maintained furniture showroom. The sofa and its companion stuffed chair were blue and plush. The floor was dark oak, as was the coffee table.

There was a gray cardboard box in the corner, overflowing with Edison’s toys. I imagined him straightening up his little boy’s mess for me while I was out in my car struggling to survive long enough to see him.

Delilah smiled. She was shorter than I, with big eyes and freckles across her copper-and-gold face. She was a few pounds over her perfect weight and lovely to me.

“Hi,” she said with a smile that added intention to the greeting.

“Hey.”

“Come on, Mama,” Edison said. “We got pizza in the kitchen.”

It was hard for me to fit into that evening with my son and stepsister. Edison showed me his room and his toys, his books and secret treasures. I paid attention like a forensic accountant gauging the worth of my little boy’s life.

Delilah loved him and cared for him in ways that I might never be able to. He could read at least a dozen words and he could count. He said please and thank you without reminder, and he was healthy and unafraid.

In other words — he didn’t need me. Delilah had brought him up into childhood with no scars or frowns on his face.

He loved me but he needed what my father’s adopted daughter had to offer. And she loved him; I could see that love in each gesture and in every corner of her home.

We watched a cartoon movie about a little beaver named Barney who had been driven out of the forest by a fire and who had to make a life for himself in the city. There he met cats and dogs, humans and other displaced forest denizens, struggled to survive, and finally found a natural paradise where the waters were clear and there was need for a dam.

By the end Edison and Delilah were both sound asleep. My hands felt huge, like baseball mitts. My head ached and my legs were numb but ambulatory.

I put Edison to bed and then woke up Deihl.

She gave me a sleepy smile and kissed me.

“You wanna stay the night?” she asked.

“I think I better. I really don’t feel like drivin’.”

She got me sheets and a blanket and fitted them to the cushions of the blue sofa.

“Me and Eddie are off early in the morning,” she said.

“Not early as me.”

There are states other than wakefulness and sleep. There is, for instance, the kind of unrest when you are so close to consciousness that you are not really out. You’re still there in the world — just separated by a thin barrier of black tissue.

I lay there on the couch thinking about dreams and dreaming of ideas. Theon was there with me trying to distract my train of thought. He was grumbling that I wasn’t paying attention. My hands and feet were swollen and I said, “Give me a break, man. I’m trying to let you go.”

There were debt collectors sitting across from the sofa, each with a briefcase full of bills that they wanted me to pay; each hiding an erection in his pants, as interest — these two words, erection and interest , hung in the air unrealized and definite.

I was lying there in the darkness but I could see everything quite clearly. I was attempting to trace my steps backward from the parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard where I gave blow jobs for fifteen dollars and was just about to meet Theon. I was trying to back into the life with my mother and brothers, my stepsister and long-ago friends Maxine, Oura, Maryanne, and Juan.

I was walking backward, away from the smelly john’s car, down La Cienega Boulevard, past the vice squad police cars headed up toward the avenue. I was going backward in time but everything else was going forward. It was very awkward, moving in reverse through life, but I kept it up because I couldn’t live on the path I’d already traveled. I got all the way back to my mother’s house, my childhood home.

I walked backward through the front door. In the entranceway Cornell had a baseball in his hand but decided not to throw it at me. He looked confused and I smiled at him, moving past him in time and space, avoiding his tortures.

I made it all the way to the living room. There I stopped and found myself once again on the sleeping sofa in Delilah’s house almost twenty years later. The front door banged open and my father staggered in, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. The debt collectors scattered. Theon stopped complaining.

“Daddy!” I screamed, and he fell on me, bleeding and choking on the blood.

I came awake in the dark room no longer able to see through the gloom. I was panting, a prayer fragment in my mind. “... and protect Mama and Daddy from harm.”

My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed.

It was six-oh-one when I got to Anna Karin’s gray door that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been late for an appointment.

Anna smiled when she opened the door and moved her body in such a way as to invite me in.

I went to the brown leather seat as she sat in the straight-backed maple chair.