Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

Whiskey and heroin could keep a girl from letting the dust of a town settle on her, as if they kept the molecules moving around at such a pace that no school, family, daughter-life could close around her. I understood the confines and also the way a mind could be forced to bust them open, its puny rules and knowledges, little gods and the fingers of old women. Sometimes I’d bring pills inside my panties. Sometimes pieces of plastic or wood or dope under the cup of a budding breast. I was at the edge of the world.

I’d like to say I saw it coming, that I’d sharpened my senses enough to expect it. But who among us can see a self? Great minds have failed and failed. And so it was that on my eighteenth birthday I saw my brother in the yard of the penitentiary, his orange suit brighter than the others, his face in full focus, his hands dangling from his arms like a man’s so familiar I couldn’t recognize them.

At first I saw him as entering a kind of tribe. I wrote the story in my head quickly: He was entering a realm of my own making, a place where reality was not infected with the disease of citizenship or social organization. I felt a kind of pride, as if I had readied the environment in some small way for him. There in the underbelly, I thought we could find a deeper relationship than blood could afford.

The first time he saw me, during a visitation period with Earl in the common room, he ignored me completely. He looked straight through me, his eyes blue-gray stones.

I signed up to see him immediately.

The glass between us, black phones in our hands, eyes locked on each other’s face.

“Hello.”

Silence.

I was hot and excited. My breath trapped in my lungs. My words flew out in all directions, pinched and condensed through the tinny microphone. “You shocked my shit the day I saw you. What are you in for? Do Mom and Dad know? I don’t think they do. No one has said anything. What are you in for?”

Silence.

His eyes crept up my collarbone and rested somewhere between my jaw and my chin.

“It doesn’t matter,” I babbled on. “How long are you—”

“Shut up. Listen to me. I’m only going to say this once. I want you to hang up. I want you to stand up, turn around, walk out of here, and never fucking come back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You think you’re the only reason I’m here? I’ve been here hundreds of times. It’s no big deal. I just thought I’d—”

“SHUT UP. Shut the fuck up.” He raised his hand; his fist and its reflection hovered there like threatening question marks. “I know why you’re here. I’ve heard all about it.” He paused; his rage seemed to melt for a moment, then snapped back. “What happened to you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re famous in here. You’re, like, the talk of the fuckin’ town.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. People here know me. They’re used to me, is all. I know the name of—”

“You don’t get it, do you? You want to know what they call you around here? Do you? They call you Hole . Just Hole.” He laughed hard enough for his missing teeth to show. “You’re like this child who spreads her legs and humps any guy who wants it. There’s pictures of you—little cartoons all over this fucking place. There’s little poems about you, about your pussy, the way you put out, how you’re a little whore.” He picked something out of his ear and looked at it, then back at me. “I heard a guy say you sucked the dick of a dead man.”

“You’re lying. You’re a fucking liar.” I stood up. A guard glanced at me. I sat back down. I lowered my voice. “I know the scene here a lot better than you. Look. If somebody said those things, it’s a lie. People here know me. Guards. Inmates. They work with me. Give me shit. I sell it. Or I get shit for them. Like you used to do.”

“Yeah? Well, how come every guy in here can give a play-by-play description of what you do?” He folded his hands on the table.

Were those my brother’s hands? His fingers? I looked at my own hands down on my thighs. They just looked like the hands of a girl. “Fuck you! You don’t know me at all. I’ve got my own life. My own money. I’ve worked hard for it. I thought you’d be glad to see me. I’m all you’ve got. I’m leaving soon anyway, don’t worry. When I’m gone, no one will know you’re here.”

“You know what happens to me when they find out you’re my sister? I’m fucking marked. I’m a dead man.”

I tore loose from his ugly mouth and words like some scared animal. I ran from that room and his hand on that black phone and his voice and his face. I ran down the linoleum hall and past the fondling guards, smirking, laughing, touching themselves, I ran past the check-in desk and out the colossal metal doors I’d seen installed, I ran down the concrete path I’d seen poured, I ran past some men in the yard, orange suits laughing like mouths, I ran against chain-link and sky, I ran to the gate, and it was closed, and I climbed it, I clawed my way up, guards with guns drawn pulling at my heels and tears and spit and my head pounding like crazy. I growled and kicked all the way down, and they were laughing, they saw who I was, and they started laughing, and when they got me to the ground, pinned and wriggling there on the asphalt, saying, “Hold on, now, hold on, we’re just trying to help you, damn it, calm down, now,” holding my wrists and thighs, I screamed, I took all the voice in me and screamed out to that big sky, to the men holding me down, to all the men in that place I’d given myself to, to the walls, the fences, the whole architecture, I screamed, “He loved me, he did, forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up the sum!” and an ambulance came, and men standing in the yard would say later, “That crazy little piece of tail finally lost it,” and “Didn’t she have a sweet pussy, all pink and sticky like the open mouth of a child, didn’t she just?”

Guy busts into the diner I’m in and blares out, There’s a woman on top of the Wells Fargo tower somebody get some help! I’m scraping the inside of my coffee cup with a spoon. The circles grate; people in booths cringe and look at me. I take my time turning around. She doesn’t need any help, I say. But she’s naked! he says, flapping and squawking. And she’s forty stories up—Christ, what if she jumps? I continue my unbearable stirring. People have turned their attention to us, a little drama for lunch. I stop stirring to say, That ain’t why she’s up there, and then I start again. I don’t even look at him. I can hear his agitation as he lurches over to me, in my face, and says, How the hell do you know? He’s exasperated. Try being married to her for a few years, I think. Try living that life for one fucking day. I finally turn and look at him. I know because I’ve been up there, I tell him. Not just this time. Hundreds of times. And, buddy, I can tell you, I ain’t going up there anymore. In Cleveland it was the pump station, in Boston the tower in Harvard Square, in Lubbock the Buddy Holly statue—which is only ten fuckin’ feet off the ground. No, sir, this is it. I’m not going after her anymore. I drink the whole cup down in one gesture, like letting all the years settle into one fine, lukewarm caffeinated beverage.

He’s not satisfied. Look, mister, he says, I don’t care if she is your wife— Ex -wife, I correct him—whatever, ex-wife, she’s in trouble, and somebody needs to help. We can’t just stand by and let—

I snort out a laugh. What I’m trying to tell you is, I was just up there half an hour ago. Talking her down on a goddamn walkie-talkie the entire way up, with a bunch of people I don’t know trailing me. You know, strangers are full to the brim with advice until an actual fuckin’ crisis hits, and then they stand there with their goddamn mouths open like bloated, paralyzed fish.