Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

“You’re full of shit. Look. We’re headed straight for the park,” Obsidian counters.

“Hot Tamales, anyone?” Ave Maria produces a box and doses us with cinnamon.

I study the computer screen. We’re not going to the Blue Ball. Or the hook up park. We’re on Seneca street. We’re in traffic. We’re gonna be fucked for a parking place. We’re going to Virginia Mason Clinic — downtown Seattle. ER. I know. How? That’s where they took my mom when she ate her bottle of pills. “It’s a hospital target,” I say.

In the car I rifle off instructions: “We’re gonna have to stage a recon by triangulating. We’ll be in the ER remember, so you gotta go with the mis-en-scène. You gotta post yourselves … you gotta go both guerilla and cinéma vérité. Obsidian? You get the micro cam. Little Teena? You pin one to your shoulder like cops do. I got the H4n and … Ave Maria, you got the spy cam?”

She nods and spits out a wad of Hot Tamales out the window of the Jag. Then she snags a costume from the small suitcase. “A hospital! I’m perfect, I’m perfect!” she shouts.

I have to admit it, her outfit kicks ass. She holds up a weird striped pinafore of some sort. At least I think that’s what it is. “Where’d you fucking get that … that apron thing?” I ask. “It’s awesome.”

“She flips her shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair and begins to change into her costume. “It’s a candy striper suit. Get it? I like the way it makes me look Florence Nightingale-y.”

I laugh. She doesn’t look Florence Nightingale-y. She kinda looks like she shoulda been in Friday the 13th. Part I .

Little Teena rubs his false detective’s badge and speeds up. “ Serpico ,” he goes.

I shake my hair back like a perfect Breck girl. Obsidian captures her black mane with a scrunchie.

We all know exactly who we are.

Except then in the back of the Jag Obsidian rubs my thigh making friction. My breathing gets weird. All up in my throat instead of my chest. Fuck. Please god of girls please do not let me pass out. I take a huge ass breath in. I put my head down. The Farrah hair is so heavy it feels like I might suffocate.

I put one hand on each white denim thigh. Palms up. I rub my cherry lip gloss lips together. I close my eyes. I breath in for seven seconds. I hold my breath for seven seconds. I breath out for seven seconds. I breathe in for seven seconds. Hold it. I do it seven times. I think maybe my mother taught me this when I was seven but can’t be sure.

There’s a girl calm people don’t know about. It’s a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn’t come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It’s born from being a not woman yet. It’s free flowing and invisible. It’s the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter . In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve.

When I open my eyes, I’m girl clear.

“You gotta pass him,” I say calmly to Little Teena. I look over at Obsidian. She doesn’t smile. Smiling’s for pussies. I take my sunglasses off and meet my own gaze in the rearview. “Step on it,” I go. “We gotta get there first,” I say to the rear view mirror. “Park illegally. We have to shadow him when he arrives.”

IN THE ER AT THE VIRGINIA MASON CLINIC THERE’S A dingy fluorescent glow — the pale light of death and the smell of human fluids mixed with Lysol. The stalls for incoming fucked people all have sad little blue curtains. Everyone in scrubs is a trainee. You can just tell. The bags of exhaustion under all their eyes, the look of maybe going Columbine, the desperate way they wheel people in and take vitals — somebody’s up all night hand shaking with cocaine tremors as they draw blood.

Little Teena’s parked his girth at the nurse’s desk making fictional inquiries about a missing person. Pinned to his shoulder is an Olympus Mini Digital Video recorder that looks pretty much like when cops talk to their shoulders at crime scenes. One benefit to the Olympus Mini? Its sleek and thin compactness. You’d think they’d be suspicious of him, but they aren’t. The trick is in the details. In the perfect 1970s brown blazer. And in the ever-so-slightly wrinkled button-down. And the shit brown and yellow striped tie. Also, shoes — if you get the shoes right, people will believe anything. You don’t have to be who you say you are. You only have to be what people have seen and come to believe on TV. Because we’re TV-headed now.

Ave Maria has somehow commandeered a hospital gift shop cart filled with lame-ola shit. Shampoos and juice boxes. Artificial flowers and sad ass balloons on sticks. Stuffed animals and coffee mugs that say “Get well soon.”

I’m in the ER waiting hall on a Naugahyde bench with my arms crossed over my pink angora chest. My head’s down like I’m very, very worried about someone close to me. But really I’m just adjusting the levels of the H4n recorder in my Dora purse.

Obsidian is down the hall a little mopping the floor. Like the Chief in Cuckoo’s Nest. No one even looks at her. She doesn’t even exist. Motherfuckers.

Secured to her wrist watch though is the Aiptek Mini PenCam. Weighing in at only 45 grams and measuring 3 cm × 2.7 cm × 8.6 cm, it’s the world’s smallest and lightest megapixel digital video recorder. Her head jerks up from mopping and I follow her gaze down the hall.

Our lead actor.

Half walking, half scooting toward the ER incoming desk, comes my man Sig and his member. His head jerks left when two Filipino nurses seem to chuckle. Poor Sig — he has to explain his condition to a none-too-impressed RN dude wearing a crocodile tooth hanging from a chain. Sig’s pathetic. He’s all bent over. He keeps clearing his throat, gesturing toward the little commandant.

I know what the Sig is thinking though. I do. He’s thinking the guy’s crocodile tooth is a masculinity talisman. Probably to ward off sexual impotence.

What? I never said I didn’t listen.

I whisper “Tiger one to Bat Boy-over. The chicken is squawking” into my Bluetooth. My voice shoots around the posse. Everyone is in position. Everyone knows exactly who they are. We are our technologies.

Crocodile dude steers Sig to a stall and gives him a hospital smock and a blue blanket to cover himself with — talk about pitching a tent. Jesus. The size of that thing.

The room on the other side of Sig is empty — the gurney all lined up with a shitty-ass hospital pillow waiting for the next victim. I’ve always hated these rooms. All the save a life gadgets and machinery looming above you like you are in the movie Alien. I bet it’s germ city, too. I know everything supposed to be all sterilized but I’m guessing it’s like a fucking stadium urinal in there. I bet there’s dead skin cells and hair and you know, fluids everywhere. Like in hotel rooms.

The whole place smells like someone shit air freshener.

Ave Maria wheels her hope of tards cart close to Sig’s stall. I meet up with Ave Maria and pretend to look at things on the cart, fingering the mugs and stuffed rodents, dabbing my eyes with a tissue.

Crocodile RN then puts an ice-pack on Sig’s wang and pushes and says, “Hold that down, sir.”

Sig lets out a muffled little yelp.

Various white coats come in and say serious things to Sig. Ask him questions.

At Ave Maria’s cart, I put my hand on a mug with a mutant looking stuffed monkey attached to it. The monkey’s head’s too big. Like a Down Syndrome monkey. Who would feel better if you gave them shit like this?