Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

A close-up. Full-color, outsized, magnified. A penis penetrating a vagina. The frame is so tight we can’t see anything else. The focus is so sharp we can see each wrinkle, each bump, each hair. The human genitals are not beautiful. There is something ugly about this. There is something very ugly about this.

We as a society are a hair’s breadth away from collapse.

A thick, musky light like clotted syrup; sidewalks and teenage hookers; bourbon and the tight ropy muscles of heroin addicts. This is the world you live in.

I listened to all this. The tips of my fingers grew cold and I shivered under my business gray. On the wall opposite, in the mural, a rickety plane teetered into the sky.

We abhor, execrate, despise.

Why does it have to be the thing, why must it be the thing, it shouldn’t be this important.

This is not the jungle.

Just stop it.

So finally I shoved my chair back and stood up, and at the scrape of the wood they all looked at me, mouths open, their faces white splashes in the bluish light. I unbuttoned my coat, moving not hurriedly but deliberately, and shrugged it off. Nobody reacted until I had my blouse half off, and then a huge hubbub of voices rose, somebody shouting for a stretcher, I heard the reporters behind me scrambling over the railing, curses as a camera light crunched into somebody’s head, then my bra was off and somebody screams, I step out of my skirt, the panties peel in a single movement, two cops are reaching over heads, I stand skin goose-bumped by the cold, hands by my sides, I cry: “No fear, no fear,” but a woman is fighting her way through the roiling crowd, her face is so deeply red that it looks like a kumquat, she shouts, spraying spit, I haven’t ever seen so much spit coming out of a person’s mouth before, “Whore, whore!” and I think I know her, I’ve seen her before, an assistant D.A. or something, one of the cops shoves her aside and she swings at him with a pocketbook, he reels holding an eye, a small spot of blood appears on a white shirt, the cop’s partner backhands with a nightstick and blood sprays from the woman’s head, it spurts in a powerful, jerky stream that spatters everyone and everything. For a moment the screen freezes and I run.

I don’t know how I got out of there. I remember running down a yellow hallway and into somebody’s office, finding this dress in a closet, and then out onto the street and into a cab. I found some money at home, but I had barely finished paying the cabbie when the TV vans began to screech around the corner. So I grabbed a handbag, threw some stuff into it and climbed over the back wall. I caught another cab to La Guardia, and took the first plane I could get a ticket for. It dropped me off in Burbank, and from there I found a Greyhound, then I bought a car on one of my credit cards, and here I am.

When Kyrie paused, I turned to look at her. Listening to her I had slid down in my seat until I was as nearly flat as I could be. Now she smiled at me, her chin on her knees.

“I don’t know why I tell you this,” she said. “It isn’t even perhaps a part of the story. But for some reason it sticks in my mind. You remember those two girls who went to the movie with Mother, the debater and the hockey player. Well, both of them died bad deaths. Janine Alcott, in ‘seventy-four they found her dead by a highway near Pasadena, Texas. She had been stabbed seventeen times. They never found who did it, or even had any ideas. Carol Ann Mayberry, who got married and moved to California and got divorced, in ‘eighty-one she tried to stab a lover with an eight-inch carving knife, and he shot her in the head. She died right there.”

She looked away from me, out of the window. The only sound was the circular buzz of the tires. Overhead, two white trails slowly disintegrated into the blue.

“Bombers,” Tom said. “Bombers from the air base at Edwards.”

“I don’t know why I tell you this,” Kyrie said, stretching lazily and lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know why.”

Amanda and I kept a silence with each other as we skimmed across the country in the Jaguar. In motel rooms, under my fingers she opened to pleasure but in it went even further into some privateness that I could not follow into or penetrate. In spite of all the talk in the car she told me nothing about herself, and the only thing I knew was the sometimes strange look of inwardness that came over her when she thought nobody was watching her, a heaviness that she turned away from with a quick shake of her shoulders. When she was driving she was beautiful: we flew across the desert under the elegant skill of her hands, and sometimes the dust behind us, illumined by the sun, followed us like a contrail, and the car banked smoothly and turned to the contours of the road. That she took pride in her driving I could see, and there was a joy in it, as if she had forgotten herself, but I didn’t know enough about the skill to praise, and so I watched her instead.

We went by the towns so fast that all I saw was a general, anonymous rush of storefronts and billboards. Once I woke from a deep sleep to see the same fragments of light in the dark, the same facades that I had seen a few hours ago. Where are we going so fast? I said, and I saw her shoulders shrug, outlined by a rapid red light that whipped past us with a distant howl of wind. I went back to sleep and awoke again to the same speed.

We stopped at a small town for food, on a scrubby main street surrounded by brown hills. I tried to eat at a diner, but I felt sick and finally the only thing I could have was a McDonald’s milk shake.

* * *

I awoke startled to the sound of Gujarati, children’s voices, catch it, get the ball, here to me. For one confused moment I thought I was back at high school in India, and felt a surge of panic: oh, God, I’m late for breakfast. Then I felt Amanda’s leg against my own. She slept on her back, legs straight and hands folded on her stomach, never moving. I touched her shoulder and she came awake immediately, and in the quick moment between sleep and her smile at me there was an unguarded look of fear, a childlike glance of terror at the white ceiling and beyond. But it passed so quickly that I thought I must have imagined it. She turned over on her side and stretched slowly.

“What’s this?” I said. High up on her left shoulder was a small smooth patch, an infinitesimal shade lighter than the surrounding skin, so subtle that it would have been invisible but for my fingers, which felt the change in texture.

“Oh, that,” she said. “It was a birthmark. My mother had it removed when I was a kid.”

“Why?” I called to her as she went into the bathroom.

“You can’t wear off-the-shoulder gowns with a thing on your shoulder.”

“A thing? Was it ugly?”

“I don’t know. It must have been.”

“Was it red?”

When she came back in she was laughing. “I don’t know.”

She sat on the bed, and I pulled her over until I could look at her shoulder. “Must have been red,” I said.

“I don’t know. You’re so weird.”

I kissed her shoulder. Making love with Amanda was slow and tense and tight and full of unexpected fierceness, and she held and held and relaxed only with a sob.

The children outside, boys and girls of nine and ten, were playing a game of Kings. I sat and watched them as they threw a tennis ball at each other, dodging and shouting. Then Kyrie and Tom walked past me.

“See you in a while,” Kyrie said. “We’re going to find a haircut.”

They strolled away, and as they turned a corner Tom swung around and waved at me. I wondered what the sleeping arrangements had been in their room, but really he didn’t seem cocky. Maybe just relaxed. But I was too lazy to think about it, and I put my chin on my knees and drowsed, the children and their game vague gray figures behind my eyes.