Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

Dawn was supposed to meet her father that night for dinner and she kept picturing herself at the restaurant, the horrible silence pounding between them. She pictured herself saying: “I want to meet my family.” She repeated the words in her mind several times, until they felt like a prayer. She had wanted to meet her father’s side of the family since she was a child but he had always refused her in a vague sort of way, saying he would think about it or just staring for a long time before changing the subject. She was sure his family didn’t know she existed. It seemed no one knew. At his sixtieth birthday party, Dawn had shocked an entire roomful of his friends. “I had no idea he had a daughter,” they all exclaimed, which in retrospect seemed rude. They should’ve lied, Dawn thought.

She looked around the room and tried to guess which customers were fathers. Then, as if summoned by her thinking, one approached her. He brought his open wallet onto the glass counter and took out a small photo of a very pretty brunette, then handed it to her. “That’s my daughter,” he said while staring blankly at the jewelry, like a dog looking at a television. “What do you think she would like?”

“She’s very pretty,” Dawn said, lingering too long with the little face.

“I know,” he said, smiling quickly.

Dawn recommended a pair of pearl studs and he stared at them. She held one pearl up to her earlobe.

“Okay,” he said and Dawn was very moved. She almost cried. He could be a bad man, she consoled herself. But he didn’t look like a bad man.

Dawn brought the earrings to the register, where Sylvia placed them in a white box and looped a glossy red ribbon around it, tying a tight bow on top.

Dawn watched the tidy spectacle in a slouching daze. When the man left, Sylvia turned with a cutting stare. “What’s with you?” she said. “Are you high ?”

“ No. I was just…” Dawn broke off. Her face had drained of all color. “I was just thinking.”

“Well don’t.” Sylvia walked past her. “Anyone could steal from you right now.”

• • •

Dawn walked home weepy and disoriented, her fever breaking. When she got in the door, Laurel was sitting at the kitchen table drinking whiskey from a Batman mug. The big bottle of brown booze sat before her, uncapped and half gone. Beside it sat a fish-shaped ashtray, loaded to capacity with short and long butts. “I can’t believe you went,” she said, her enormous head swiveling in Dawn’s direction. Laurel still had her uniform on but she’d peeled her stockings off. They hung from the back of her chair.

“I’ve only been there a week. I can’t just call in sick.” Dawn sat down and sighed. “Sylvia hates me.”

“Who?”

“The other girl who works there.”

“Oh. So what.”

“She asked if I had a drug problem.”

“Well you do,” Laurel smirked. “But the drug is you .”

“It’s true! I still can’t wrap gifts… I’m not even allowed.”

“So what.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You wanna be one of those strange high-octane charm machines? People who fold things really well?” Laurel sneered. “They’re nuts and stupid.”

“But I should at least be able to—”

“There are no intellectual slackers,” Laurel declared. “These people… they have no curiosity. You belong in the eighties.” She took a long drink from her mug. “You know Jim Jarmusch sold popcorn at St. Marks Theatre. He was this freaky white-haired guy. He had a pompadour.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“My mother told me.”

Dawn pictured the eighties in lower Manhattan, lush with possibility. It depressed her. “I don’t get why artists still move here,” she said.

“Be cause ,” Laurel said, “they wanna drink with other smart, disappointed people.” She raised her mug. “Want?”

“I’m sick.”

“It’s good for that.”

“No. I’m meeting my dad in like an hour.”

Laurel stared coolly, then looked away.

Dawn watched her, knowing full well that refusing a drink was tantamount to betrayal in Laurel’s mind.

“I thought you hated him,” Laurel said.

“I still do. I can’t believe my mom slept with him.”

“They’re back together?”

“No. I mean that she ever slept with him.” Dawn tried to picture her dad as a cute younger guy. It actually wasn’t that hard. “My aunt told me my mom tricked him into impregnating her. Like, they had broken up and she went to this bar where she knew he would be.”

Laurel poured more whiskey into the Batman mug and set it before Dawn. “You can’t trick someone into fucking you,” she said.

“That’s what I think. It was his choice. But I guess he figured that if she got pregnant, she’d get rid of it.” Dawn hesitated, then sipped from the mug and grimaced.

Laurel smiled. “So you’re the trick,” she said. “That makes sense.”

“The what?”

“ I’m the mistake,” Laurel said. “My parents didn’t mean to have me.” She grinned, proud somehow. “And my brother was the gift. Because my mom didn’t really want kids but my dad did. She wanted to give him that.” Laurel smiled again. “So you’re the trick.”

Dawn nodded. “I guess I am.”

“You always say your dad wishes you’d never been born. So that’s why. He didn’t have a say.”

“Well neither did I.”

“Oh stop,” Laurel said kindly. “Thank God your mom tricked him. I mean, thank God he was at that bar.”

“I don’t know why we have to bring God into it.”

“Forget God. I’m just really glad your parents fucked that night.”

“Well thanks,” Dawn laughed.

But Laurel seemed not to hear her. She was staring just past Dawn’s ear at nothing in particular, her eyes wide. “It’s weird that some precise sexual act produced us,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s like the porn you can’t have.”

This excited Laurel. “But what if you could ?”

Dawn stared at her, waiting for the speech she could feel burning in Laurel’s thoughts. Her enthusiasm was always this way, like a fire that begins in the basement and quickly climbs throughout the house, radiant and snarling. “I mean, what if you could see that sex?” Laurel said, obsessed. She was very erect in her chair now. “I mean what if you had that technology?”

“What technology?”

“It would be like a solution,” Laurel said carefully. “Made from a plant discovered in Brazil or somewhere.” She paused, piecing the trembling bits of her fantasy together. “And when you applied it to your skin, it would reveal that your cells were taking pictures all the time. So your skin had a memory of its whole long photo shoot. Even of events that predated the body.”

Dawn smiled. She looked down at the empty mug in her hands and refilled it, almost to the brim. “And how would they discover that the plant did all this?” she asked, smiling.

“Well because everyone who came into contact with it — like whole villages — were having these strange dreams. And it was always the same dream.” Laurel had a sleazy grin now. “The scene of their conception.”

“You’re such a fucking pervert.”

“And once they created the solution it would become like a business. People would pay to see the sex that spawned them. All porn would become this… specific past,” Laurel said slowly. “And eventually it would even take the place of having sex.” She lit a cigarette giddily and expelled a cloud of smoke. “It would be called Pornogenesis,” she said with satisfaction. “Everyone would go to these little booths that were actually kind of like spas. And afterward they would sit out front in robes and share about their Pornogenesis. The slang term would be ‘the hitch.’ People would be like, so how was your hitch?”