Averil Dean - Alice Close Your Eyes

Recently I read that the bicycle was vandalized and the front wheel removed. I imagine the bike’s decapitation, the final indignity. I don’t want to see it.

* * *

“Mocha decaf,” says Midge.

“You’re good,” I say, easing the café door shut. A rich aroma greets me: coffee and cream, and something seductive from the huge ancient oven behind the counter.

“What else?” she says.

“Whatever that is in the oven.”

Midge smiles, wiping her hands on her canvas apron. She has always reminded me of a Sesame Street monster. Small, square, adorably ugly. A huge fierce grin full of crooked teeth, a tuft of wiry black hair. “You can’t have that. It’s a wedding cake.”

“So cruel. Thank God there are muffins.”

I take my breakfast outside and lay out my notes and pages. It’s early morning, drizzly and cool. Across the gravel road, two gray horses appear through the mist, grazing in a ragged field against a backdrop of dark pines. One of them lifts her head and lets go with a high-pitched whinny that rips through the stillness and trails away.

Aside from the Red Ranger tree, Vashon-Maury is like any other island in the Puget Sound, with one utilitarian commercial district featuring a handful of disorganized grocery stores, interspersed with touristy shops bearing hand-painted names like Heron’s Nest and Treasure Island, where you can buy mugs depicting the Seattle skyline or salt and pepper shakers shaped like the island’s famous strawberries (which nobody grows anymore, though the festival lives on). On Thursdays, we have a farmers’ market with lumpy rows of pumpkin and zucchini, and jars of organic jam covered by squares of red-and-white gingham, tied around the lid with hemp twine. At the north end of town, our single-screen theater shows last season’s films in a postapocalyptic setting; the stoner at the ticket counter will ask if you want popcorn, and if you do he’ll follow you to the snack bar to ring you up, then trudge upstairs with a hot dog for himself and start the film ten minutes late.

It’s a humble town, peeling and briny. So it makes no sense for me not to sleep at night, but the fact is I can’t. I haven’t slept in the dark since I was thirteen years old. Instead, I spend the nights working on my manuscript—Zebra Down, fifth in the series of young adult novels that’s been paying my bills since I left high school—and in the mornings I take a walk or ride my bike to the Beanery for a cup of coffee.

I brush the crumbs off my fingers, open a book of writing prompts and choose one at random. This is my daily routine, my exercise, prescribed by an online writing teacher who believes in the importance of keeping the creative muscles loose. Ten minutes, scribble like hell, see what comes out.

Faceless men.

I set the timer on my phone and begin.

At night I dream of faceless men. They move through the architecture of my imagination like spirits, shadowy incubi who wait for sleep to deliver me. They press me into the walls, the floors, and I am trapped here in the structure, with all my ghosts inside me and all my rooms on display. I let them seduce me, reveal me and all the secret places where I simmer and burn, let them lift me up and drag me down and nail me with their need, until I feel the push of everything male against all that is female in me.

My phone beeps at the end of ten minutes. I read my page of scrawled handwriting as I sip my coffee and crumble a bite of muffin over my plate.

Nail me, I think disgustedly. Paging Dr. Freud. I cross it out and write it back exactly the same way. Twice.

I obliterate all three versions with lines that dent the paper, rip the page from my notebook, crumple it and toss it toward the trash can. The paper bounces off the rim and lands on the sidewalk. Before I can get out of my chair, a man on his way out of the coffee shop stoops to pick it up.

Jack Calabrese. He grins and starts to open the page.

I leap up and snatch it away.

“Whoa,” he says, laughing. “Check out the reflexes on the little cat burglar.”

I back away, the ball of paper in my fist, and begin to pack up my notebooks. My heartbeat accelerates—I feel the pressure rise in my neck.

“Don’t go,” he says.

“I need to get home.”

“Why? Is someone waiting for you?”

My mouth tightens. No one is waiting for me, but his tone implies that he knows this already. As though such a thing is outside the realm of possibility.

“Sit with me for a few minutes,” he says.

He is unshaven but his hair is damp, and he has a freshly scrubbed look about him. His flannel shirt is soft with age, drooping over the bump of his shoulders, the cuffs rolled up over his brown forearms. He has a cup in his hand and under his arm a book that he lays on the table as he claims the seat across from me. Intensity. Dean Koontz.

In the distance, the tsunami siren blares. We recognize the test pattern and ignore it.

“You’re a writer, then,” he says.

“Nothing gets past you.” I sink into my chair, still collecting my notes and battered index cards. I wind a rubber band around the latter and shove them into my satchel.

“So hostile. You got no time for the guy who caught you breaking and entering?”

His tone is even, but the challenge in his eyes, framed by the heavy rims of his glasses, stops me. I snap my bag closed and lean into the back of my chair.

“I apologized for that. What else is there to say?”

“People do have unnecessary conversations sometimes, Alice.”

My name sounds too easy coming from him. Too familiar.

“Look. I get that you feel entitled to mess with me. But unless you’ve got something to tell them down at Barney’s cop shack, you can fuck straight off.”

“Got it. But have dinner with me first.”

“Yeah. That’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

I don’t want to answer. The fact that he’s here makes me uneasy. I know his schedule—at 7:00 a.m. he should be at work. It occurs to me that he may have followed me, and I don’t like that turn of the tables at all.

I get to my feet and sling the satchel over my shoulder. “Let’s just say, it seems like a bad idea.”

“I can’t believe that’s something that normally stops you.”

Heat rushes up my neck. I pull up my hood to cover it, and carry my dishes to the plastic bin next to the trash can.

He raises his cup to bid me goodbye. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

I grit my teeth and turn away. It feels like a long walk to the corner where I’ve left my bike, and with every step I feel his stare at my back.

It takes all I have not to turn around.

* * *

He is all I can think about on my way home from the café, through my hot shower, as I brush my teeth and hair and crawl at last, at 9:00 a.m., into bed.

At first his face fills my mind’s eye. The sharp line of his jaw; the row of even white teeth, flashing like sunlight on water; the double frame of his glasses and thick dark eyebrows, under which his eyes gleam with mischief. But as I lie in my bed with the memory of him, stroking tentatively over the thin, warm fabric of my cotton underwear, his face becomes shrouded, dissolving into obscurity. I know it’s him the way you know it in a dream: it’s his presence, his name in my mind, but he has become both more and less than himself. In my fantasies, he’s an archetype, faceless and almost formless. He is what he does. He is the idea of a man.

I remember his house, the doorknob cold in my hand, his long arm stretched above me to hold the door closed. He’s angry that I’ve invaded his space, angry that I want to leave. I have crept deliberately into his den and my curiosity has a price.

You want to know me, he says, and his hand is in my hair. The scent of him fills my mind. He tips my head back and kisses me openmouthed, laying a first easy claim to the inside of me. I feel his attention, all his focus on me. He has tasted me now. He can smell me. His hand moves down the front of my body to my breast, and I feel my nipple gather in his palm. His body stiffens, slows for a moment, and I sense the predatory tension in him.