Marian Palaia - Given World

“I know how to find you. You glow in the dark. Get in here.” I don’t ask about the cat right away, and we drive back to my flat in the Mission. My roommate and his girlfriend are out of town, so I can run a bath for Lu, keep her for a day or two. I put the cat in its carrier in the bathroom to keep an eye on Lu and put her clothes in the washing machine. When she’s done in the bathtub, I wrap her in a bathrobe and put her to bed. “You sick?”

“Not too terrible. Been doing some home-remedy detox since Chrissy OD’d. Pot and Valium. I got a stash.” She doesn’t try to hide the abscess scars on the back of her right hand. I hold it and run my thumb over one of them. Smack doesn’t burn like that unless it’s cut with something really weird.

“What the hell, Lu. Speed?”

“I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Something new. Chrissy liked it.” She looks at the scars like she’s seeing them for the first time. “That’s what killed her. She was just a kid.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“I didn’t know how much, Cook. I think I almost died too. My legs went right out from under me. My heart must have just been stronger than hers.”

“You’re a pro, Lu.”

“You bet I am.” She looks away so I can’t see her eyes. After a minute, she reaches into her pocket and holds out a handful of little blue pills. “You want some?”

“Not now. I’m pretty sleepy. I’d just waste it.”

The cat yowls from the bathroom. I raise an eyebrow at Lu, but she just says, “He came to me in a dream. His name is Mick.”

“Mick.” At the moment, whatever it means that Lu named her cat after my brother, accidentally or not, doesn’t register. Not on any scale. That’s how good I am. “Does Mick eat?”

“There’s food in my bag.”

I get the cat, the bag, a bowl, a towel, a dishpan with some torn-up newspaper in it. I say, “We’ve got ’til Sunday.”

“Time enough,” she says. Then, “What’s that line? That song? About Valium. That Rickie Lee Jackson song.”

“Jones,” I say.

“Yeah, sure, whatever, Cook. But what does she say? You know.”

“She says you shouldn’t let them take you back. Broken.”

“Like Valium?”

“Right. And chumps.”

“Out in the rain,” she says. “I love that. It makes so much sense.”

“It doesn’t really,” I say. But it kind of does.

I could just holler, but I might not ever stop, so I close my eyes and play dead instead. When the Valium kicks in and Lu falls asleep, she’s curled around me like a boa constrictor.

Amazingly, she stays cleaned up for a while: two months and a slip, two more, et cetera. It gets so I nearly start trusting her to show up when she says she will, even though a part of me is off in the corner, frantically waving its arms in alarm and asking loudly, “Have you completely lost your mind?” She gets a little room down on Market for her and that cat, a place that’s safe and not blow-your-brains-out depressing like most of them. The guys at the front desk are nice and, of course, immediately fall in love with her because she’s smart and funny and doesn’t take any shit. She gets a steady cab gig with National, driving mostly night shifts, but night is her best side anyway, since she’s still really vain and it’s so much harder to see in the dark how the years have worked her over — better than the Cajun could ever have done to me and been allowed, by Lu, to live.

I don’t see her every day, or even every week, but she stops by the bar when she can, shows me her drawings, the old atlases she picks up secondhand — ones that show Zimbabwe as Rhodesia, Southeast Asia as Indochine. We do normal things, like go down to Divisadero for Philly cheesesteak lunch dates, or Valencia for cheap sushi or Vietnamese.

She sits in the backyard at the bar, sketching the skyline, the haphazard tree cemetery, the wild masses of flowers and vegetation that never seem to die back here, but only hibernate a few weeks in winter. Nothing like Montana, where winter lasts from October to May or longer, and when the spring Chinook starts to blow, you feel like the thaw has been your whole life getting there. (Some dad or some brother takes a little kid outside, and they stand in a brown patch of dirt and dead grass. “This,” the dad says, or the brother says. They take their boots off to feel, with their feet, the earth come back to life.)

We’re in Saigon Saigon one day when Lu asks about Slim, who he is, and my brother, how old he was when he died. She knows about Mick. Some things but not everything.

I’m pulling splinters off my chopsticks, arranging them in a pile by my plate. “I don’t know anyone named Slim.” I want to stick one of those splinters in my eye. She’s waiting, and I want to surprise her by doing that. But I’m too tired. “Mick was twenty-one when they lost him. Why are you asking me these things?”

“You know you talk to them in your sleep?”

“How the hell would I know that?” I get up, drop ten dollars on the table, walk out to the bus stop. She doesn’t try to stop me.

The next week, at the bar, she eyes me out from under the brim of her hat, astonishingly aware that there is a line dividing what we talk about from what we don’t, and that she has crossed it. I think I’m more disoriented by her awful cognizance than by her unerring ability to open up places that by all rights should have permanently, or at least officially, healed over.

“Why did you name your cat Mick, Lu?”

“He reminded me of Mickey Mouse. His little crazy ears…”

“You are such a fucking awful liar.” She doesn’t contradict me, but it does occur to me that maybe she isn’t lying. We stare each other down for as long as we can stand it. I will not for a second admit I could be wrong, and she knows that I know it’s a possibility. This is something new to me, being held to account by someone with her ducks, if not in a straight line, at least in a loose formation, and I am not good at it. I want an out, and this time she doesn’t have to give me one.

But she does. “He reminded me of you too. Those crazy little ears.”

“Fuck you, Lu. You and your cat.” I can barely talk, but screaming is a clear and present option.

She comes behind the bar before I can get away and grabs me by the arms just below my elbows, leans her forehead into mine and says, “It don’t mean shit if it doesn’t hurt, Cookie. Don’t let him go.”

“Don’t. Tell. Me.” I pull away from her and back up against the basement door. “How to remember him. You don’t know a fucking thing about it.”

She stands there with her hands still open, her eyes bright and wide. “I’m trying to help, Cook.”

I laugh, knowing it’s the cruelest thing I can do. “Now, that is fucking funny.”

She backs away, hands up in front of her now, unconsciously fisted in a boxing stance, almost a crouch, protecting her rib cage, her belly. “Hey,” she whispers, “it’s me, your stand-up guy. Remember?”

My teeth are clenched. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you so much.” My teeth feel like they will always be clenched now. Like this is permanent, this grinding pain.

I watch her go and try to find a way to blame her. Turn Janis up on the jukebox as loud as I can stand it, unhang the beer signs, and wash the filthy windows so actual sunlight can get in. My jaw aches. I don’t care. Take another little piece of my heart. I don’t fucking care.

• • •

Lu stays away for a short while and then sashays in one hot September afternoon like she’s been showing up at exactly this time every day. She brings me a burrito, with one bite out of it. I shove her quarters for the pool table.

“Rack ’em.”