Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

So he gets to be the ethical one and I have to surrender my art? Fuck that noise. I put my phone down. This calls for a more careful approach. I open my Dora the Explorer purse. I pull out my beloved purple sharpie. I scan the room for paper. I see a pad of paper on his desk, nab it, and scrawl out: What’s n it for me? I hold the pad up for him to read. Then I fake smoke my sharpie. Smells like felt pen.

He smiles. “If you agree to give the video to me, Ida, I will help you not only to recover your voice, but I will help to release you from your current situation. For good. Forever.”

Sly bastard. I don’t know what he means by that but he’s for goddamned sure got something up his sleeve. I nod my head up once at him in the universal street lingo of s’up.

Then he drops the bomb. “Ida, I’ve arranged for a scholarship to attend Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Free. It’s one of the finest film institutes in the country. Where you can, my lovely, raging girl, make any films you like.”

Motherfucker. Wonder how long the sly dog has been sitting on that one.

You know what I look like right this second? A kid with a pink plastic purse who is smoking a sharpie like a candy cigarette. If my knees were skinned I’d be about, oh, eight years old. I take the goddamn sharpie out of my mouth. My mouth hangs open. I don’t know how to do this I don’t know how to dot his I don’t know how to do this FUCK. Even inside my voiceless girl sack, I’m speechless.

I’m baffled, but I’m not dead. I text therefore I am. Wl think bout it , I text, even though it makes me feel like someone I don’t know.

I WISH I COULD SAY LIFE GIVES YOU A SUCKER SHOT once in awhile, but my empirical data has shown that it’s nearly always a one-two punch.

Before I can even come-to from the stun of what Sig just said to me, I find Ave Maria and Little Teena sitting on the curb outside his office. Little Teena stands up. Ave Maria bounces like a pinball.

“They’ ve got Obsidian!” Ave Maria squeals, cupping her elbows.

My eyes go big. I put my head in the direction of Little Teena.

“What she means is, Obsidian’s been arrested.”

My breathing immediately clusterfucks and my head fills with cotton. I see stars. Do NOT faint. Hold it together you pussy. I close my eyes and picture a tree with roots. I try to feel my feet like roots in the ground. I have no fucking idea where that came from but I have a million mile away flint of memory that my mother told me that when I was eight. Then again, I’m prone to hallucination. I kick one foot with the other to try to keep from going numb.

I grab Little Teena’s shoulders and put my head down some and give him the sternest look I can muster.

“OK listen,” he says. “Try to stay calm. Obsidian was up at the rez near Coeur d’Alene to see her cousin and her dad’s brother came at her. Drunk I guess. Pinned her to the ground and started trying to … you know. The cousin jumped on his back to try and stop him and Obsidian, well, Obsidian…”

I don’t need to know what the next sentence is. I know. Obsidian took her shard of Obsidian that hangs from her neck and cut him.

“She cut him. Across the neck. Almost his jugular. Fucker nearly bled out right there.”

“Like in the movies!” Ave Maria sings.

I give her a drop dead look.

“Or not,” she whimpers.

I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body. I put my head between my legs. Don’t pass out. Don’t pass out. Don’t motherfucking pass out. Your feet are roots in the ground your feet are roots in the ground I can’t feel my feet.

“Ida!” An Ave Maria high note.

Then Little Teena’s hand on my back.

In my head there are so many things I don’t understand. Songs, words, images I don’t even know where they came from. Are they from my life, or did I dream them up? Is there a difference? I open my eyes and sit up. It’s dusk. The clouds streaking through the sunset make the sun look wrinkled. Maybe it doesn’t matter what’s real and what you dream up. Maybe what you dream up keeps you alive. I can feel Little Teena rubbing my back. I can hear Ave Maria humming. I look at the wrinkled up sun again. The sun in the Seattle sky is a girl belly button above low waist skinny jeans.

I stand up. I retrieve my iPhone from my Dora purse. I text, Whrs she. Xactly.

Little Teena and Ave Maria’s asses buzz. They check their cells simultaneously. God I love technology.

Ave Maria says “They’ ve got her in a juvie center near Renton!”

I text, Juvie? She’s nearly 18. Whyd thy snd her 2 juvie?

Little Teena touches my shoulder as gently as a loving brother ever could. “Ida, Obsidian’s not nearly eighteen, honey. Obsidian turns sixteen next month. Didn’t you know?”

See what I mean? One-two punch. Only this isn’t about me. This is about the girl I love. With all my heart. I love a girl named Obsidian and somebody’s gotta save her from girlhood before it’s too late. This time my feet aren’t just on the ground. They’re in the ground. I’m a motherfucking girl tree. I text, “ Cum on. we’re goin. ”

“Going where?” Ave Maria peeps, running alongside me with her hands and arms inexplicably windmilling.

“ GunA gt my hom gal outa thr. ,” I text.

Without blinking, or talking, or thinking, Ave Maria pulls on her hair on both sides of her head and sings up toward the falling wrinkled sun, “We’re gonna need the Jag,” absolutely knowing what it’ll mean. Way.

WHILE AVE MARIA AND LITTLE TEENA WORK ON STEALING the Jag yet again, I stomp my way into night toward Marlene’s. Watching my own Docs on Seattle pavement I have another epiphany. I don’t need home. A daddy. I don’t need my mommy. What I need is my Marlene.

At Sea-Tac Airport Marlene is a he: Hakizamana Ojo. Like I told you before, Hakizamana Ojo is in charge of manning one of those full-body scanners. He has a high level of clearance when it comes to security. He is very good at his job. He’s been promoted three times — even Homeland Security couldn’t find anything weird about him, despite his name. There’s probably no one at Sea-Tac who knows more about security than Hakizamana Ojo. Nor more about genitalia. Nor more about identity swapping.

One night when Marlene got dumped by some asshat with a pencil mustache — no doubt one of those hipsters from Portland — we sat on the top of her apartment building and cried and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beers. We made a silver and blue beer can pyramid with the empties. It was pretty big pyramid. Marlene was crying. A lot. I had no idea what to say or do so I just sat there like a lump. But a loyal lump.

Finally Marlene said, “When I was a boy in Rwanda my German father beat my mother within an inch of her life. He beat her because she’d been raped. Then he left forever. I nursed my mother back to health. I wore woman clothes. Her clothes. I wanted to be soft and good like nurses and mothers are. The next month I wore a dress into the township and four boys older than I shoved a truncheon into my anus and beat me within an inch of my life. I managed to make it back home, and my mother had a plane ticket for me. To go to live with my father in Germany. She said, ‘You and I are Tutsi. They are killing us everywhere.’ She said, ‘you will die here if you stay. Take that dress off.’ I loved my mother more than anything in the world. By that time she’d been repeatedly raped and had a scar from being burned across one eye. I remember thinking, is that the worst thing that can happen to a person? Death?”

Then Marlene stopped crying. The moon was big. Her rooftop looked lit up like a stage briefly. “I have the ability to make any passport. I can be anyone I like. Forever. Or make anyone into anyone else,” she said. Or he. Nothing bad that ever happens to me is going to be as bad as what happened to Marlene. And yet there we were sitting on her rooftop with a PBR pyramid. Just two people with gender issues. I never forgot that moment. How Marlene and Hakizamana were both there. Interchangeable. If need be. In moments of danger or love. We walked back into her apartment leaving the Pabst pyramid as testament to something.