Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

The song went on and the sweetness was crushing. She longed to fall into George Harrison’s vulnerability — that yawning abyss. But she couldn’t. She was too aware of how many seconds were left in the song: forty-six. Now it was forty-two. Why does everything have to end? she thought and paused the song in anger.

She moved her laptop to the foot of the bed and scratched her stomach. She wore just underwear and a T-shirt with an alligator on it. Out of habit she reached for the old record cover leaning against the wall by the bed: Rubber Soul . She didn’t have a record player but she wanted one. The record had appeared one day on a tan blanket in the street. It sat between some scuffed VHS tapes and an ugly brown leather jacket. It was four dollars. “Is two okay?” she had asked the bearded man but he shook his head. “Four.” So she gave him four.

Now she took the record into her hands and stared at it, moving her fingers over the four faces. When she reached George, she pulled her hand back. His cheek felt warm. Then she noticed he was blinking. He was staring at her.

Her heart raced. “It’s you.”

“Where am I?” His eyes zapped around the small pink room. Papers everywhere. A green bureau crowded with Coke cans. Cigarette butts pressed out on the windowsill. He seemed to clock each thing.

“In my — well, this is my room.”

He stared a second. “Why am I here?”

“I don’t know,” she said but it felt like a lie. He seemed to be there because she had prayed for him to be. Because there was a God — a good God — the kind who returned phone calls.

For a while they just stared at each other. Then, cocking his head, he said, “You’re so nervous.”

“No I’m not,” she said and he went on staring. It made her squirm. “I mean, maybe I’m a little nervous,” she said. “About my book.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I have to finish the last story. And I can’t.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about me… and actually you’re in it too.”

“So it should be easy.”

“But it isn’t!”

“Maybe because you have to—”

“I know, I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes. “I have to love myself.”

George laughed. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

“I don’t have to love myself?”

“No. You have to play.”

“What — like a guitar?”

“No. You’ve got to have fun, that’s all.”

“Oh.”

“At some point play got banished,” he said in a rehearsed sort of way, like a monk had told him and he remembered. “Children play because they live in their own time. But most people when they get older, they leave their own time.”

“Where do they go?”

“Wherever the culture tells them to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Play gets replaced with a desire to be accepted, a desire for identity ,” he sneered. “Everyone wants to be someone.”

“It’s easy for you,” she said, feeling hurt. “You never had to be someone. You just were someone.”

“How would you know?” He sucked his teeth. “You don’t know me. You think wanting to fuck me means you know me?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t,” he said with disgust. “You’re a fantasy addict.”

“I’m a writer,” she shot back.

“So write then. Tell the truth.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t know how.” She was holding back a sob. “I’m always gonna be like this.”

“Like what?”

“A monster.”

George stared, his dark eyes softening. “So write about that.”

The walls were glowing — pinker suddenly — like a sunset in the womb.

“What if no one cares?” she said. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

“Don’t think so much about the future.”

“Why the hell not?”

“ Because ,” he said carefully, “it doesn’t belong to you.”

“Okay,” she said. She was starting to feel a little angry. She pulled a cigarette from the pack on her side table and lit up. “So what does belong to me? Nothing? I’ve got nothing, right?”

“No. Not nothing. Come on. Not nothing.”

“What then?” she said, smoke charging from her nostrils.

“You have this,” he said. “ Today. Not tomorrow.”

She ashed onto the floor. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know that,” he said and a train of red hearts floated by. She touched one and it laughed in transit, then vanished.

“But am I crazy?” she asked.

“Yes,” he grinned. Then all around the room she saw it towering in giant black letters, the word: YES. YES. YES.

She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled, then felt her cheeks warm up and wanted badly to be kissed.

“Give me a puff, will you?” he said and she held the cigarette to his lips. He took a long suck, then blew a skinny cloud. “Again,” he said and she returned the cigarette to his mouth. He seemed to take all the time in the world inhaling. It felt religious. Then smoke poured from his mouth in a slow, sensual manner, crawling up through the air like a herd of lazy white lizards.

“Alright,” he said and she dropped the cigarette in an old glass of water by the bed. Hearing it sizzle, she said, “I’m just a slow writer.”

“Who needs to play,” he smirked.

“What I need is quiet.” She felt a speech gathering in her thoughts and contained it. “I’m not gonna talk about my process,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too boring. I mean, I hate when writers talk about their process. They always look so proud of what they’re saying, like it’s the frosting on the cake.”

“But it’s the shit on the shoe.”

“Right!” she exclaimed, then stared into his dark grin. It was a face both warlike and unprotected, which was exactly what she wanted from a man: something open and shut.

“Why am I in the story?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Cause I can’t stop thinking about you.” She blinked thoughtfully. “If I’m gonna write about myself, I have to write about you. You’re in my head.” She stared hard at him. He didn’t seem to mind. He must be used to it, she thought, which felt a little sad. Like he was a very special monkey.

“In the story you’re dying of cancer and you’ve kind of accepted it,” she explained. “You keep saying how everyone turns to dust and stuff like that. But I’m going nuts. I don’t want you to die. I’m sitting by your hospital bed and I keep saying it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair .”

“What isn’t fair?”

“That you’re dying!” She stared at him, timid suddenly. “I mean, that you died . How could that be fair? All sorts of schmucks live to be a hundred… so they know something you’ll never know.”

George was quiet. A soft look of violation passed over his face.

The dead are innocent, she thought, feeling guilty. But she couldn’t stop herself. “I just think I would’ve known how to touch you.”

“You and every other girl in the world.”

“Yeah well, every other girl is wrong. Every girl but me.” She sat there staring and felt like a baby, then a fool, then a crazy person. “You’re a creature of another time… a time I’d like to crawl into.” She began to cry. “I can’t be young now. I don’t know how. But I could’ve been young then.”

He just stared. Maybe he didn’t agree that the sixties would’ve embraced her. She herself couldn’t be entirely sure. But it was a feeling and it burned, the feeling of aloneness in her own time.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked, wiping her eyes.