(Author's note: Chapter 130,022 of this story, as seen in the print edition of Hot Pink, features text in its margins. Due to restrictions of the .epub format, marginalia cannot be sufficiently represented on your device, and so the text that constitutes the print version's marginalia has herein been rendered as a pair of footnotes. —Levin)
CHAPTER 130,020
DREAMS ABOUT FLYING
Susan Falls hates the flying dreams. She wakes up and she can’t walk, which is beside the point. She can’t walk when she wakes from non-flying dreams, either. The flying dreams speak of an unconscious obsession with walking, her therapist tells her.
The therapist tells her about the stages of death and dying, harping mostly on the denial stage. What the rest of the stages are isn’t important. What is important is that when the therapist tells her about the stages, he does so, he says, because he does not think the loss of Susan’s legs has been properly mourned. To Susan, this is nonsense.
She lost her legs as a baby, in the jungle, to gangrene, after the leopard bit her. So she’d never really had them to begin with, at least not long enough to require her to mourn their loss. Besides, what upsets her isn’t that she can’t walk, but that she has dreams which would seem to suggest that somewhere deep inside she wants to walk, when nowhere non-deep inside does she.
And tacky dreams at that. The flying is always travel-channel scenic: Susan soaring over the ocean or the mountains, between skyscrapers with puffy-cloud reflections on their windows. It might be different, might point to something real or individual about Susan, if she flew over the Gaza Strip or post-NATO Belgrade. Mazar-i-Sharif. She never dreams of what she wants to, though, no matter how hard she thinks about whatever that might be before she goes to sleep. Last night, for instance, she thought of Carla Ribisi’s ass for nearly an hour, and ended up cruising over the Grand Canyon at four thousand feet.
CHAPTER 130,021
THE ACCIDENT, PRETTY TO THINK SO
Susan and her mother are in the all-white kitchen, drinking orange juice, waiting for Susan’s father to come downstairs before eating the egg dish that Jiselle, the distant cousin who came to America to be an au pair but could not find a job as an au pair and so has become the cook, has made. Jiselle is on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.
“You don’t look so good today, Sus,” Susan’s mother says. “Bad dreams?”
Susan nods, staring through the glass table at the glass table’s frosted glass base. Where the kitchen isn’t white or transparent, it’s mirrored, and if she looks up, she risks being confronted with a vision of herself first thing in the morning.
“Was it about the accident again?” says Susan’s mother.
Susan shuts her eyes with a force that, had she any magic in her, would be great enough to knock the whole penthouse into orbit. Susan’s mother likes to talk about the accident. She likes to say, “Susan would do well to talk about the accident, herself.” She says it to everyone.
“I asked if you dreamed of the accident,” says Susan’s mother.
“The accident?” says Susan. “How could I remember the accident well enough to dream about it, anyway?”
“Now don’t—”
“Don’t what?” Susan says. “Don’t mention your lackluster mothering style? Your irresponsibility? Don’t question the sanity and goodness of a woman who’d not only leave her baby on a jungle floor but let the wounds she suffered by the leopard’s fangs fester and—”
“Oh, the leopard. Isn’t it pretty to think so!” Susan’s mother says. Susan’s mother sneezes, angrily, and screams for Susan’s father.
Susan’s father, dressed in beige suit-pants with braces half-braced, his untucked U-shirt flapping at his belt-line, thumps down the spiral staircase to the kitchen. “What is it?” he says. “What’s happened?”
“She’s talking about leopards again.”
“Oh my God.”
“Forget it,” Susan says. “Forget it.”
“Susan, do you need to go back to the hospital?” Susan’s father says.
“You’re still in the denial stage,” Susan tells her father. “Dr. Fleem told me to expect that from you. But what I want to know is: what about me? What about me?”
“Damn that Fleem,” Susan’s mother says, and to her husband: “Call the Medicar.”
“Frances, just hold your horses for just a second here, honey.” Susan’s father pulls a cigar from somewhere in his pants and fondles it against the beam of a mean halogen bulb. He says, “Now Susan. What was it you were saying? Something about leopards?”
“No. Nothing,” Susan says. “I wasn’t saying anything about leopards.”
“How did you lose your legs, Susan?” Susan’s father says.
Susan is crying. Her mother is staring at her. Her mother looks like a bug and Susan does not want to one day look like her mother. “A car,” Susan says.
The egg dish that Jiselle made is getting cold and it looks very good, too, very tasty. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that she’d been formulating this egg recipe, experimenting with temperature, testing various sauces, spices, and coagulants for nearly six months, and that it had, at last, become perfect; there was not a similar egg dish all the world round, at least not one Jiselle had heard of, and while it was true that the appeal of eggs for breakfast tended to be their banality, Jiselle believed the dish, novel though it was, would, owing to its deliciousness, prove itself to have serious staying power. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that, in her most private thoughts, she called the thing Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish and that, of late, she had something of a dream, and this dream (in sum) was of Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish becoming vastly popular over the next twenty years, worldwide popular, and thereby eventually becoming a banal egg dish itself, at which point the dish’s name would be simplified, shortened, to Eggs Jiselle.
And now it was getting cold, Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish. The auburn-tinged glaze atop the whites was becoming a filmy gel.
“She’s only just saying it,” Susan’s mother says. “She doesn’t really mean it. She’s only just saying it.”
“Now, now, Frances. Susan, tell us more. You said ‘a car.’ What about a car?”
“I was playing in the street with Pedro. A car ran us over and I lost my legs.”
“How old were you?”
“It was last year.”
“How old were you, Susan? was the question.”
“I was thirteen when the car hit me. It was the day before my birthday. I turned fourteen the day they hacked off my legs.”
“Who hacked them off?”
“The doctors.”
“Where did the doctors hack your legs off?”
“In a rondavel.”
“Susan!” Susan’s mother says.
“My legs were infected, Mom, and after lightly anesthetizing me with an orally administered paste of palm wine and pulverized valerian root, the doctors, as you like to call them, chopped off my legs with their rusty machetes in a dung-floored, thatch-roofed rondavel.”
“Medicar!”
“Just kidding,” Susan says. “It was at Children’s Memorial.”
“Liar. You’re lying. You don’t believe what you just said.”
“I need to go to school now,” Susan says.
“You need to go back to high school, young lady.”
“I hate high school.”
“High school was the most glorious time of your life.”
“I need to go to school.”
“Not until…”
“Please, Mommy. I’m sorry. I love you. You didn’t leave me to the teeth of that dastardly leopard. Please, let’s just eat our Eggs Jiselle and get on with the day.”
“Eggs Jiselle! Did you hear that, Frances?”
“She sure can turn a phrase, Mike, can’t she, our girl Susan. Little smartypants. How much do you love Mommy?”
“This much.”
CHAPTER 130,022
MIDRASH IN THE MORNING, NOWHERE DEEP INSIDE DOES SHE
Susan has the duration of the ride to campus to do yesterday’s assignment for Media Studies 761: Consuming God. She takes Genesis Rabbah, a book of midrash, from her bag, and reads a story about God and Adam that her professor has asked her to present to the class this afternoon. He wants her to frame it as “the first ever buyer-empowerment scheme.”
The story: Before there was an Eve, Adam was lonely and bored and sad, and, to fascinate him, God revealed the future of the world, taking care, as He did so, to remove all episodes that would occur within the span of Adam’s lifetime. Though God’s plan worked at first, Adam eventually grew distracted by his loneliness again. God reconsidered showing Adam his own (Adam’s own) future life, but judged, for the second and final time, that doing so would be a grave misstep, and instead chose to try His hand at improvisation. Rather than continuing to show Adam what would be, God showed him what could be, were one event that was slated to occur one way to instead occur another way.
1The story of David—who slew Goliath, loved Bathsheba, and, as its strongest king, made of Israel an empire—was particularly moving to Adam, despite his knowledge that it was only a could-be, that David would, as originally foretold by God, die at birth. Only a few words into the Psalms, which God had spelled out for him in clouds, Adam found himself weeping at the thought that David would never write them, and he transferred seventy years of his allotted thousand to David, so that David would survive beyond birth and do everything that, before the transfer, only he could have done.
What Susan believes: Adam gave life to David out of love for David.
What Susan would like to believe: Adam gave life to David out of love for the world—gave David life so that the world would not be deprived of David.
What she is being asked by her professor to spin: Adam gave life to David out of love for Adam. Being that Adam was the first man, Susan plans to tell the class, all men would be of him, and being that Israel, under David’s reign, would be the world’s greatest kingdom, Davidic-era Israel would be the greatest achievement to come of Adam’s creation. Susan would say that Adam, as he read the Psalms in the sky, was not moved 2as much by their beauty as by how their beauty would affect his legacy. She would say that Adam wept at the possibility that his legacy could be so glorious, yet wouldn’t be so glorious if he failed to take action. She would quip, “And therefore, Adam’s giving of life would be better described as spending, and better yet as investing, for its purpose was to ensure a future payoff.” If the class was with her—they rarely were—she planned to close with a joke about “the intricacies of calculating a time-lost to glory-increased ratio.” With or without the joke, she was confident she would get an A.
What Susan Falls is considering for extra credit: how Adam, who was born a man, and who, without his Eve, without knowing he was a male in the male/female dichotomy—and so knowing nothing of human reproduction—could know that other men would come from him, rather than from the word of God, where Adam had come from.
As the limo exits the Drive at 55th, Susan sets the extra credit aside for later consideration and begins to write in the margins of Genesis Rabbah. While doing so, she is struck by the idea that Adam might be a lot like her—his seventy years her lower body, David her brain. Some time, early on, when she knew things in a pure sense, she might have made a deal with God, an investment of her earthly legs in a transcendent mind with high-capacity intellect. It was pretty to think so.
So pretty, in fact, that she doesn’t realize the limo has stopped, has been stopped for minutes, until Jake, the driver, lowers the separator and pronounces her name. “Susan,” he says, “are you not well? Would you like me to wheel you to class today?”
CHAPTER 130,023
CONSIDERING THE UTILITY OF BLUE SNOWPANTS
Susan Falls thinks Carla Ribisi has a big ass and that Carla Ribisi’s big ass is beautiful and that Carla does not know it. And Carla Ribisi is always wearing blue nylon snowpants. The intended effect of the snowpants is to disguise the bigness of the ass in bigger-ness, Susan Falls thinks. It is a complicated trick. It begins with a syllogism. The first premise is that anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass:
1. Anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass.
2. Carla Ribisi wears snowpants.
... Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass.
The trick comes of the word appears. Appears allows for, but does not necessitate, visual trickery. Things that allow for but do not necessitate other things are tricky, and tricky things engender consideration. Things that allow for but do not necessitate trickery itself are even trickier, and these things engender much richer consideration. The richer the consideration engendered by a thing, the longer the time one will spend considering that thing. Consider the following hypothetical situation:
Susan Falls has just started dating Carla Ribisi, and the two go shopping for a T-shirt for Carla. They go into the changing room and Carla tries on one of two stretchy V-necks she’s deciding between, a red one, say, a warm kind of red, like that of the hair under Susan’s arms. The T-shirt looks good and Susan Falls tells Carla Ribisi that the T-shirt looks good.
Carla tells Susan Falls that this is the first time she’s shared a changing room with another woman since the long-lost days when she used to shop at indoor malls with her mother. Susan Falls blushes. Carla Ribisi removes T-shirt #1, and, reaching for T-shirt #2, looks at Susan Falls, longingly(?), and says, “Blusher.”
Being called on blushing causes dollar-coin-size spots of the same shade of blush as Susan Falls’s face to appear on Susan Falls’s neck.
Carla pulls her head up through T-shirt #2. “I’m sorry,” she says to Susan Falls. “I didn’t mean to make you embarrassed when I said you were a blusher.”
The dollar coins darken in time with Susan’s ecstasy.
Susan’s ecstasy is like neither a balloon nor a hat pin, but like a hat pin’s entrance and movement, under the guidance of a cotton-gloved birthday clown, through the skin of a balloon.
There is something that is so Goddamned hot about Carla Ribisi considering and, further, discussing any effect that she has had on Susan Falls. Let alone in a Nordstrom dressing room, trying on T-shirts.
T-shirt #2 looks good, but in a different way than the way in which T-shirt #1 looked good.
“So?” Carla wants to know.
“It looks good,” Susan says. “It makes your tits look bigger.”
“Hmm.” Carla doesn’t know if she likes that. She has big-enough-looking tits already. Showing them off, she has decided at different times in her past, makes her look trampy. “That’s good?” she says. “That it makes my tits look bigger?”
“You have beautiful tits, Carla. The T-shirt just brings it out.”
“Do you mean to say that my tits are essentially beautiful, and that the appearance of more of my tits reveals more essential beauty?”
“Yes!” Susan says, now thrilled to damp underthings by Carla’s obsessive parsing and analysis of a sentence Susan has spoken.
“Or do you mean to say,” Carla says, “that my tits are beautiful because they’re big, and therefore my tits, upon looking bigger, appear more beautiful because ‘you can’t get enough of a good thing’—the good thing being the bigness of tits?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. I’m having fun with you. And attempting to choose between T-shirts at the same time. So which T-shirt’s better?”
“I don’t know that we can make informed choices about the T-shirts at this point, because now that we’ve spent so much more time on the one you’re wearing than we did on the first one, we’re probably invested in the one you’re wearing, and—”
“I’m not gonna sweat that, Susan. Which one do you like better?”
“My opinion—”
“Your opinion isn’t founded on a bedrock of rigorous analysis and therefore etc. etc. etc.?”
“You are making fun of me.”
“I’m telling you that I want and will buy the T-shirt that you prefer,” Carla says.
“Are you sure? Because you’re saying it in this way that it sounds like maybe you’re making fun of me.” Susan Falls begins to shiver, and then she begins to cry—not really, but hypothetically.
Susan’s hypotheticals often end sadly and hardly ever make their point with force. Disregarding the ever-present effect that the Wheelchair Factor has on her confidence, the Sadly Ending Hypothetical Factor is the number one reason for why she can’t bring herself to engage Carla Ribisi in conversation. But back to trickery:
The considerer will arrive at two interpretations of “Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass,” each one implicated by the other:
A. The actual size of Carla Ribisi’s ass cannot be known at this juncture (snowpantsed).
B. Carla Ribisi’s ass is a mystery.
Susan Falls has, by now, watched enough TV and studied enough social and cognitive psychology, she hopes, to soon fulfill her dream of becoming one half of a powerful and revered creative team at Leo Burnett. Susan knows about attribution. She knows self-perception theory. Susan knows that for every considerer, there is a specific amount of time, designated x, that must be spent considering a thing before the considerer becomes aware that she has spent time considering the thing. Moreover, Susan knows that after the considerer has considered an as-yet-neutral (unvalenced) thing for x, that thing will appear to the considerer—unless she is someone who suffers from terribly low self-esteem or clinical depression—to be a good (positively valenced) thing, for the (non-depressed, self-esteeming) considerer knows she wouldn’t spend her time on a thing that wasn’t good. Therefore, once the mystery of Carla Ribisi’s ass has been considered for x, the mystery of Carla Ribisi’s ass is good. And all good mysteries are good to solve, so solving the mystery is also good.
In order to solve the mystery—in order to see Carla Ribisi sans blue snowpants—one would have to spend time with Carla Ribisi, time enough to wind up in places where wearing snowpants would be out of the question: dressing rooms, beaches, showers, etc.
If Carla is a smarty—and Susan is sure that Carla must be, for Susan wouldn’t otherwise waste so much time gawking at and thinking about her—then Carla, to ensure that any given considerer’s x be met or surpassed, would stretch out this getting-to-know-Carla time for as long as possible before letting the considerer see her without snowpants, for in being kept from seeing what Susan will call Carla’s true ass for x or longer, the considerer, always considering, would work the previously outlined self-perception algorithm, but this time the considerer would transpose solving the mystery with true ass, itself, such that not only would to solve be a good thing, but true ass (the solution) would also be good.
If Susan Falls were to create a successful television advertising campaign for Carla Ribisi’s ass, the only two things she would have to figure out would be (1) how much time x equals for the average viewer, and (2) how to make the campaign compelling enough to keep the viewer considering it for ≥ x.
If Susan Falls could pull that off, then even if the viewer were to start with a bias (e.g., “prefers big asses,” “disdains small asses,” “abjures jacked-up small asses that look bigger than they are”), the bias would, by campaign’s end, be made irrelevant; whether im- or explicitly, the viewer would, once her x was met, reach the same conclusion as Susan:
Any ass worth spending all this time on must be some really good ass.
CHAPTER 130,024
AN ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
The other brilliant aspect of Carla Ribisi’s blue snowpants is the sound they make when Carla enters a packed lecture hall, tardy, as she just has. Except people in college are never called tardy. The tardy go to high school. In college they’re late, and this is the sort of thing—this usage of tardy—that Susan Falls wouldn’t want to betray to Carla Ribisi upon their first actual meeting, but might come in handy later on, when Susan decides it’s time to coyly let Carla know something that she wants the whole world to know.
Susan wants the whole world to know that she is a fifteen-year-old college freshman, but she doesn’t want the world to know that she wants the world to know. She wants the world to see her as the sort of person who would not only make light of such an achievement on her part in conversation, but the sort of person who would really not consider it an achievement. She has a statement prepared in explanation of her being a fifteen-year-old college freshman, and she hopes that the topic will come up so that, one day soon, she can make the statement. This is the statement:
“Ah, well… When you’re legless, no one wants to play with you, and TV gets boring fast, so all you have are books and time.”
CHAPTER 130,025
SHIKKA SHIKKA, A GLIMPSE AT DEATH
Carla Ribisi enters the packed lecture hall, late for Logic I: An Introduction to Propositional Logic. Her snowpants make the snowpants sound. For every person present, the sound is the seed of a tree of uncountable self-perceptions relating to Carla, and, three strides in, Carla sees them all watching her, the professor included. He’s clearing his throat, over and over.
Instead of making her way to her usual desk at the back of the lecture hall, she considerately heads to the nearest open seat, which is in the front row, between a deaf boy—in front of whom crouches an interpreter whose frantic signing distracts all hell out of the ASL-fluent Susan Falls—and Susan Falls, in front of whom is a wheelchair.
The interpreter signs, “Lecture interrupted by noise: S-H-I-K-K-A S-H-I-K-K-A,” and Susan’s mind twirls at the thought of signing sound for a deaf boy; at the thought of a deaf boy reading a sign for a sound; at what must be the sameness, to a deaf boy, of a sign for a sound and the sound the sign stands for. As if a sound were nothing more than the sign that stands for it.
Susan Falls shivers, like in the Nordstrom dressing room, but not hypothetically.
Carla Ribisi, while getting settled, inadvertently knocks loose the brake on Susan Falls’s wheelchair. The wheelchair rolls down the moderately sloping floor of the lecture hall. “Oh God,” whispers Carla Ribisi.
And Susan’s shivering body starts to shake, only, with her mind still twirling, it’s as if it isn’t Susan’s field of vision that’s trembling, but that which is in her field of vision; the shaking of Susan’s body seems to be the shaking of the classroom, and although a part of her knows that it’s her body shaking—a part of her knows from experience that classrooms don’t shake—the shaking of her body, rather than being expressed by the words my body is shaking, seems to be the expression of the words my body is shaking. And no part of her knows otherwise, not from experience. And the thought of this makes her shake harder.
And harder, until the rolling wheelchair strikes the wall beneath the tray of the chalkboard and clatters, and Susan startles out of the twirl. Stops shaking. Ideas can’t get startled, is what she tells herself; they can’t shake. Names don’t shiver, she thinks. The world is not just a word with an l. Everything is fine. The twirl was an outcome of low blood sugar is all.
Look at things, Susan thinks, look at the wheelchair.
The wheelchair, having struck the wall, rolls back a few inches, as if the wall had struck it back, thus describing Newton’s third law of motion—rather, demonstrating Newton’s third law of motion… Or rather demonstrating the effect of Newton’s third law of motion, for the wheelchair doesn’t do the demonstrating, does it?—the motion of the wheelchair does the demonstrating… Newton’s third law of motion, which is the name of a principle described by Newton, explains why the wheelchair describes the motion that it describes after striking the wall. And a shiver comes on.
Better to look at Carla, Susan thinks.
“Oh God,” Carla says. “Oh no.” The shiver wavers, quits. Susan never got to eat her breakfast is all, her Eggs Jiselle, she tells herself, and to quell the last tiny remnant of her panic, she inhales deeply, slows her blood down. What Carla hears is mounting rage.
“Oh God,” says Carla Ribisi once more. “I’m really so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Carla,” says Susan. And all her panic is gone.
“It’s just, God, I mean, it’s just that…”
“Carla?” Susan says.
“I hate today. Anything I do is wrong.” Tears tremble in the scoops of Carla’s eyelashes. One falls, splats against a thumbnail the color of a robin’s egg, is atomized. More follow.
Everyone in the classroom continues to watch Carla Ribisi, even the professor. To defend Carla, Susan Falls glares at anyone who thinks she’s strong enough to stand the eye contact. It is a sacrifice. Susan also wants to watch Carla cry.
“Let’s leave,” Susan says.
“Really?” Carla wipes snot on the arm of the matching blue parka that she hasn’t yet removed. The parka’s shell is a shiny kind of nylon, iridescent, and the snot is clear and perfectly straight, like some three-inch pinstripe. It performs miracles of refraction with the fluorescent light particles that fall through the grids of the ceiling panels. Now Carla leans in close and whispers, “But,” and then she sees the line of snot. “God that’s gross. I’m so gross…” She snorts a giggle.
“But what?” Susan Falls says.
Carla, still whispering: “How will we get out of here?”
“Just pull my chair over and we’ll go.”
“Everyone’ll see.”
“Fuck them,” says Susan Falls. This is the first time, in her entire life, that she has employed an extra-cerebral profanity. Though in fantasy she has often used swear words, she has never spoken one. It feels good, and it occurs to Susan that, as stupid as most people sound when they use profanities, as stupid as she must have sounded just now, the feeling of power that just rushed through her, from inner labia to thyroglossal duct, the trace sensations leftover from just now, just now when she said the word fuck, make sounding stupid more than worthwhile.
“Fuck them, then,” Carla Ribisi agrees, and it is the hottest motherfucking thing Susan has ever heard.
CHAPTER 130,026
TWO BOUNCES IN LOGIC
Carla, eschewing the intricacies of the plan, crouches in front of Susan and, at the sign-language interpreter who is staring at her, makes this sound: “Tch.”
“Hook your arms around my neck,” Carla says.
“Really?” Susan says, but she’s hardly gotten it out before she’s in midair, her stumped thighs at Carla’s soft sides, under her unzipped parka. It is two steps to the wheelchair, and so two bounces, from which Susan deduces that the thing rubbing against her is a navel piercing.
“Okay,” says Carla. With one arm, she turns the wheelchair around, then lowers Susan into it, slowly, their bellybuttons meeting for a sliver of a second. “Do you need me to push you?”
“Not at all,” Susan says. She follows Carla out of the lecture hall.
“Nice knowing you, ladies,” says the professor.
CHAPTER 130,027
IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF LOGIC
“That guy’s such an asshole,” Carla says.
“He just wants to fuck you.”
“I think maybe he wants to fuck you.”
Susan’s first impulse is to insist that what Carla has just said is not true at all. Instead, she says, “He probably wants to fuck us both, simultaneously. If he had it his way, he’d have us from behind, have us each bent over his office desk. He’d slide his dick in and out of your pussy, so he could watch your beautiful ass twitch beneath his sloppy thrusting, and he’d keep his unclipped fingers rhythmlessly whittling away in me, so as not to obstruct the freak-show view of my lower half.”
Carla gasps and does a cat stretch. “That made me tingle, what you just said,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Susan Falls.”
“That’s a pretty name. You want to go somewhere and get really fucked up?”
“I have my Moderns in Paris seminar in an hour but… Fuck it. I was born to get really fucked up with you, Carla.”
CHAPTER 130,028
A DANCE, A DAMNED GOOD TIME TOGETHER
Carla rents a second-story room from a professor of music on 59th Street, just east of Ellis Avenue. The home is a standardly professorial Victorian, rampless. Carla wheels Susan through the alley and up to the garage. Punching out the command code on the number pad, Carla bounces a little and turns her head to smile at Susan, twice. “That’s my Ali Baba dance,” she says. The garage door opens. “Have you ever smoked opium?”
Susan considers telling a lie, but chooses not to. “No. Never.”
“Good,” Carla says. She wheels Susan into a corner of the garage and crouches down in front of the chair, the tip of her ponytail touching Susan’s half-lap. “Wrap around me,” Carla says. Susan obeys, lets her hands fall where they may on Carla’s chest. Carla stands up.
“You’re strong, Carla. How’d you get so strong?”
“I speedskate.”
Rather than remarking on any number of the positive effects that she imagines speedskating would have on the ass of Carla, Susan utters a simple “Wow,” but her face is pressed against Carla’s face, and she feels Carla’s face get hot, as if Susan had remarked on the likely effects of speedskating. Susan likes that.
Carla brings Susan up the stairs to her room. There aren’t any chairs. “Where do you want to be?”
“The bed’s fine. If you can get me somewhere near the headboard, so I could lean…” she is saying, but Carla is already getting her somewhere near the headboard so she can lean.
“Good?”
“Good.”
“How old are you, Susan?”
“What?”
“You seem older than most freshmen.”
“Actually, I’m fifteen.”
“Wow, you’re like one of these genius kids who basically skips high school, aren’t you?”
“Ah well…When you’re legless—”
“That’s really hot, Susan.”
CHAPTER 130,029
OPIUM
It doesn’t matter that the opium came as a gift from Dan Batner, this totally evil ex-boyfriend who Carla had met at an MBA mixer she’d accidentally wound up at last semester. It doesn’t matter that he gave it to her last week. His reason for giving it to her—to let her know that, had she not decided he was such an evil young man and then told him to stay away from her, she could have still been with the only opium dealer on campus, and likely the only opium dealer in the tristate area, had she not been so cold—doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, either, that the opium is not opium, but rather Nopium, an incense that Dan Batner mail-ordered for $19.99 per forty-ounce brick off an ad in the back of a glossy head magazine. Nor does it matter that the black brick of Nopium isn’t crumbly/gummy in the same way that opium is crumbly/gummy: doesn’t matter because any underclassman at the U of C who’d have researched opium’s texture on the internet—no U of C underclassmen had ever had opium in hand—would have only found words such as “crumbly/gummy” to describe opium’s texture, and words like “crumbly/gummy” could really mean anything within reason if you thought about them hard enough, anyway. Plus, Nopium smells like real opium, which is a smell that anyone anywhere in the world can become familiar with, as Carla and Susan have, by watching the movie The Wizard of Oz and imagining the smell Dorothy smelled when she fell into stuporous sleep in the field of poppies when the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Poppies, poppies,” and caressed the crystal ball with long-nailed and delicately fingered green hands while winged monkeys cheeped and yapped and giggled.
It doesn’t matter that Susan and Carla are smoking incense out of Carla’s color-morphing glass pipe, because even if it were real opium, Susan’s not inhaling it. She doesn’t know how. Inhaling vs. not-inhaling is not a dichotomy she is aware of. And even if she were inhaling real opium, it wouldn’t matter, because it is not the drug but the shared will to use the drug, to share the mouthpiece of a pipe, and to ditch class together, and drag ass across campus to Carla’s room, which smells like Carla’s hair, like almonds and autumn and soap, that matters. The undone inertia of unlikely emotion-laden circumstance, of tears and knocked-loose wheelchair brakes riding on the sound of blue nylon snowpant-legs rubbing one another is what matters.
“I’m so high, Carla,” Susan Falls says.
“So am I,” Carla says. They are stretched out on Carla’s double bed next to one another. “Since we’re both so high,” she says, “let’s pretend we’re not.”
“As you wish. You know, your room smells so good.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Hey, Carla. I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’s your major?”
“I’m undecided.”
“What between, Carla?”
“Between psychology and dropping out of college. I like the way you say my name all the time, Susan.”
“I think I want to drop out, too. Do you ever take those things off?”
Carla giggles.
“Do you?” Susan says.
“Are you coming on to me, little girl?”
“I’ve never come on to anyone before.”
“You want me to take them off?”
CHAPTER 130,030
A LEOPARD
Ten seconds later, Susan says, “No, not yet. Leave them on for a little while.”
“Do you smoke cigarettes, Susan?” Carla pulls a pack of Marlboros from a secret pocket inside her snowpants. “Here. Smoke this cigarette with me and tell me how you lost your legs.”
Susan drags on the cigarette, but, as with the opium, does not inhale. She says, “I’ll tell you, Carla.”
“Tell me.”
“It was a leopard. A leopard bit my legs in the jungle when I was an infant. I was lucky to survive. Gangrene set in, though, and they had to hack off my legs with a machete to prevent it from spreading.”
“A leopard?” Carla says. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. And I was an infant, so it wasn’t so much the leopard or the gangrene, I guess. An infant can’t watch out for—”
“Not to interrupt or be crude or anything, but this question just popped into my head, or maybe not, maybe it’s been in my head for a while, since because, you know, of what you said earlier, about the desk and everything, and us being high even though we’re pretending not to be high maybe provides me the space or excuse or whatever you want to call it to ask you this question, but are the workings of… Rather, can you—”
Carla is blushing.
“Blusher,” says Susan.
“Does your…”
“Yes. And I call it my naz-naz, which is Farsi. What do you call yours?”
Carla kisses her knuckles smackingly. “Tell me about your leopard,” she says.
“It might have been a car,” says Susan. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it was a car, and that’s what everyone tries to tell me, but I tend to doubt it was a car.”
“Why would they tell you it was a car if it wasn’t a car?”
“Any number of reasons. Maybe they do it for my benefit or maybe for my mother’s. If it was a car, then according to them I was trying to save my box turtle, Pedro, who I’d brought outside to play with, from being run over by the car. But I know otherwise. I know that if it was really a car, it was because Pedro was crushed, either accidentally or on purpose, while I tested the strength of his shell beneath the wheels of my mountain bike, and that Pedro’s death destroyed my will to live, so I threw myself into oncoming traffic with suicidal intent. That’s too ugly, though, so they say that I fell into the street while trying to save Pedro from being crushed by a car, because that way accidental circumstance—rather than I—can be blamed for my state of leglessness. That’s how the lie would benefit me. As well, it serves my mother on a couple levels—no mother can be expected to keep an eye on her thirteen-year-old daughter at all times, let alone control the pathway of a wayward box turtle or an oncoming car. However, a mother can and is expected both to keep her infant daughter off the floor of a jungle where hungry leopards live and to raise such a daughter not to have suicidal ideations at the age of thirteen.”
“Well, so wait,” Carla says, “do you have any memories of walking?”
“I have millions of memories of walking, but I also have memories of dreams, of flying.”
“Those were dreams, though.”
“But they feel similar enough, dreams and memories, that it wouldn’t be rigorous to trust the distinction.”
“What about photographs?”
“You can doctor those things,” says Susan. “It’s all beside the point, anyway. I’m legless. Hopefully I make up for it with brains.”
“You make up for it by a long shot,” whispers Carla. She is leaning over, separating Susan’s bangs with her thumbs. “Does your fancy brain make it up to you, though?” she says.
“Without my fancy brain, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Here where?”
“Here here. Let alone right here, able to demand you remove your snowpants.”
“I already said I would.”
“You said you would before I was in a position to demand it… This is a confusing courtship, at least in light of what I’ve read so far, but I know it wouldn’t be right unless there were a few feints before revelation. We can’t just have everything without complications, you and I. There’d be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we’d die unstoried deaths. My distant cousin invented a new and wholly novel egg dish that is probably extremely delicious and she can’t imagine its immediate success, even though most success, nowadays at least, tends to be immediate. She can’t see Eggs Jiselle becoming instantly famous. She sees an extended process where the name of the dish changes over a long stretch of time and respect slowly builds for her, and fame collects at the same turtle’s pace, and the Ritz begins serving Eggs Jiselle some ten years down the line, and ten years later Caesar’s Palace and Hotel Nikko, and even Spago eventually takes its own stab at the dish, adding rosemary or wasabi or something, and there’s a lawsuit over recipe patents or copyrights, which probably don’t even exist, but a struggle and a long time and a lot of effort, because if Jiselle imagined it otherwise, there’d be nothing to look forward to looking back on. So if without a story even the fame of an egg dish isn’t viable, then how about true love—it would be impossible.”
“What about first sight? There’s tons of stories about love at first sight.”
“In the good ones, though,” says Susan, “the love’s thwarted by outside forces. And if it isn’t, then death comes to one if not both of the lovers as soon as the love’s consummated.”
“So they never have the chance to betray one another. It’s merciful.”
“Not entirely, though. The one who lives, if one of them lives, ends up struggling to find meaning in a seemingly meaningl—”
“I don’t think this’ll kill you too fast, Susan.” Carla lowers her head, kisses Susan’s neck.
“If it doesn’t…killyoufast…it isn’t…true… I really should get… I have a presentation to make in Media Stud…”
“Are you dying?” Carla says.
“Yes, please.”
Carla gets off of Susan, removes her snowpants. She doesn’t have a big ass at all.
“You don’t have a big ass at all.”
“Would you have preferred a big ass?”
“I might have, but it doesn’t even matter. I’m impossibly dedicated to your true ass.”
“Have you ever had sex with a girl, Susan?”
“No, Carla, I haven’t even been kissed by anybody but you and my mom, and those kisses were so long ago, they might not have happened, even.”
“Do you want to smoke more opium before we do? To guarantee we’re high? It’ll thwart us sufficiently, I think. When we look back, we’ll have to worry about the possibility that it was the drug, rather than love, that allowed for the damned good time we’re about to have. We’ll have to meet again sober to find out for sure. But we’ll smoke more opium then, too, and every time after that, and so we’ll continue to worry and we’ll struggle and struggle, thwarted forever. You can’t doubt a plan that pretty, can you? Isn’t it a pretty plan?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 130,031
NOT FRENCH
Jiselle and Susan are on opposite sides of the tiny balcony. A half-tempo electronic rendering of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is coming through the speakers of the box on the railing. At the end of the overture, Susan says, “Hey, Jiselle, can I borrow a cigarette?”
“Borrow a cigarette? What, are you gonna give it back to me when you’re done?”
Jiselle thinks this is awfully funny when, really, it’s just stupid fucking banter. On the other hand, Susan knows that one asks not to “borrow” a cigarette but rather to “bum” a cigarette for precisely the reason Jiselle has made salient.
Jiselle says, “When’d you start smoking fags, anyway?”
“This afternoon.”
“How’d you like the eggs?” Jiselle says.
“They were ungodly,” Susan says.
“They were not.”
“I didn’t actually get to eat them, but Jiselle, let me ask you. In terms of cousinhood, exactly how distant are we?”
Jiselle extends her arms as far as they’ll extend. “No blood,” she says.
“Wow, your armpits are shaved.”
“I’m British, Susan. I’m not French.”
“Neither am I. Fuck.” Susan puffs at her cigarette.
“Are you gonna inhale on the bloody thing or what?”
“What?”
Jiselle demonstrates.
Susan mimics, coughs, considers.
Her mind twirls at the thought of getting high on opium that never entered her system; at the thought of Adam distinguishing between himself and the world and its future and his own; the thought of a man, not yet slated to die, thinking to give seventy years away; of how to understand the difference between giving and having while alone and immortal in Eden. How you could mourn the end of something you never had a chance to take for granted.
Susan starts to shiver, and she shivers till she shakes, and it doesn’t let up when she flops out of her chair. It doesn’t let up when her ass hits the floor of the balcony, nor when the impact shocks her spine. Even after the back of her head strikes a corner of her wheelchair’s footrest, and even after the back of her head strikes the corner again, and her skull pushes in her brain, she doesn’t stop shaking, not for a full seven seconds.
The breathy honking that comes from Jiselle might sound like weeping, but because she keeps sticking her tongue out and saying things like “Good one,” and “Joke’s up, bloke,” and finally, mysteriously, “Bung-o,” her dying cousin concludes it’s not weeping. And then her dying cousin is dead.
CHAPTER SUSAN
SUSAN
Free-floating three feet over the balcony, disembodied Susan is at once alarmed and relieved that Pedro is not there to greet her. The alarm soon dissipates, however, because disembodied Susan is looking at her disemSusaned body, at her head turned left-cheek-up, the cigarette she dropped at the start of the shaking burning her hair away, and it is gleefully a shame. Susan knows everything now. She knows, for instance, that while Jiselle, who has run inside to call for help, starts to cry, she is silently repeating, “She asked for the fag, I didn’t push it on her,” and, though she can’t seem to express it, or anything else, Susan knows for sure that nothing is inexpressible.
The hair on the head of the body burns away quickly to reveal a red mark Carla kissed atop a freckle just below Susan’s left ear.
“How I was pretty, isn’t it pretty to think so, how I was pretty to think so, says Susan, thinks Susan,” Susans Susan, Susaning.