4. MOLLY

I wear my navy-blue shirt when I go to Talley’s Tatters. I have my hair slicked back and to the side and I think I look handsome. Talley shows up and she’s all smiles in a red dress with white polka dots and a lacy bodice. Her hair is longer, darker, a fifties bob, a wig.

“Told you that shirt would look good,” she says. I thank her. She opens the door and disarms the security system. She turns on the lights. We walk behind the purple cash wrap. She pats the stool next to her. I sit. Our knees are close to touching. She opens her computer and asks what I feel like listening to. I tell her whatever.

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Anything is fine.”

“I know this. But I’m asking you. What do you listen to?”

The last album I downloaded had been three years ago, probably rap. I shake my head.

“Here’s the deal, Mason Hues. I’ve offered you a job. Although this place isn’t exactly rocket science—oh, all you have to do is type in the style number of the piece into this screen here, and then take their money, that’s it—it’s still a job. That means you can at least try to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, that came across way bitchier than I wanted it to. What I meant to say is don’t be nervous. No wrong answers here, okay? Just two people sitting behind a counter pretending to work. Sound good?”

“Sounds good.”

“Now, what do you want to listen to?”

“Elvis.”

Talley raises one eyebrow. “I like it.”

She puts on a live show, something from the early seventies. She looks around the store and sighs. I feel like I’m failing because I’m too quiet. I try to think of something to say and then I chastise myself for feeling nervous and in need of making small talk. The silence becomes a physical mass. Talley adjusts her wig.

She eventually gets up and tells me to follow. We go to the far side of the store. There are two cardboard boxes full of used clothes. She tells me to hang each item, steam it, more for bedbugs than to get the wrinkles out. I nod and Talley stares and then I apologize.

“For what?”

“For being quiet.”

“Shut up,” Talley says. She smiles, but it’s not a real smile because the skin connecting her ear doesn’t tighten. “I’ll break you out of your shell. Probably sooner rather than later.”

I start steaming clothes. I dig through the lives that people no longer want. I think about people getting too fat or too skinny and then about a husband having died and some widow finally, after two years, mustering the strength to box up his things and drop them off.

The hanging bells above the door ring. A guy walks in with tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt. He navigates the store like he knows it well. He sneaks up behind Talley and pinches her sides and she screams and laughs and then kisses this boy who might be a man. She presses her chest to his, her hands slipping around and tucking themselves into his back pockets.

I feel jealous.

One always said that jealousy could be a useful tool to gauge the level of which Self was running your life.

I pretend not to watch, to avert my eyes from intimacy.

One and I talked about this tendency of mine on multiple occasions. The first time he brought it up was after I’d been in his house for a week. He asked what, specifically, spoke to me loud enough to come find Truth. I felt embarrassed, as I did any time an adult spoke to me. I told him it’d been what he’d said about looking for something else.

One shook his head.

“Thirty-Seven, it’s natural to lie. It’s what we’re conditioned to do. It’s a form of survival. But what good does it do?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Whenever somebody tells you they aren’t lying, they are.”

“I don’t think I’m lying.”

“What made you come here?”

I thought of something smart to say. I started telling him what I thought he wanted to hear—I was sick of the bullshit life of school and popularity; I was in search of something real and authentic— and then One grabbed the back of my head. He pressed his forehead to mine. I worried he was going to kiss me. His skin was greasy.

“What did you see that made you come here?”

“The couple on the couch. They were sick. They were tender.”

The edges of his lips curled upward. “There it is.” He let go of my head.

“What?”

“The first honest thing you’ve said since arriving.”

“Thank you.”

“Why was that so hard?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Because it felt…”

“Words may be imperfect tools for bearing Honesty, but at times, they are all we have.”

“I shouldn’t have been looking in the window in the first place.”

“There are no accidents.”

“I guess.”

“You were attracted to a showing of intimacy. A selfless act of love not predicated upon sex. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because it’s the rarest thing on this planet. Unconditional love. Love without sex. Love without expectations. Love of helping somebody worse off than yourself.”

Talley introduces me to her boyfriend, Derek. We shake hands and then he’s back playing grab-ass with Talley and I steam a small, shelled fleece jacket and think about the boy it belonged to, him leaving home, probably first to college, then to some city that paid for his services, his mother cleaning his closet, her holding the jacket, pressing it to her face, lost for a good five minutes in the memory of him in that coat, his boisterous energy taking up every inch of their home, the stillness since his departure, stillness and silence, her marriage nothing without the active duties of parenthood.

Derek leaves and Talley saunters over. Her energy has changed. She’s lighter on her feet.

She says, “He’s cute, right?”

I shrug.

“Please, you know he’s beautiful.”

She obviously wants me to agree, so I smile, nod.

“He’s in a band.”

“Of course he is.”

Talley gives an insulted laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. He just looked like a guy who’s in a band.”

“Beautiful?”

“Beautiful.”

“They’re good. Really good. Kind of like stoner punk, you know? Like soulful early Ramones.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about. Elvis sings an uninspired version of “Mystery Train.”

“They’re playing tonight. You should come.”

“Tonight isn’t—”

“Shut the fuck up. You’re coming.”

There is no reason I can’t go. There’s no reason not to do anything. She walks toward me. She kind of moves to the music and then she moves a little bit more. She takes the shirt I’m steaming off the rack and holds it to her chest, her left arm outstretched. She dances around with it in a circle and she looks back at me and I grin because she needs me to. She needs me to approve of Derek. She needs me to approve of her life. She needs me as a project and a father. I can give her these things. I really can.

I meet Talley outside of A Fine Line at a quarter to ten that night. She wears the same red dress, but she’s altered it, cut out the middle, dissecting the garment into a skirt and matching crop. Her belly button is confused if it wants to hide or be seen and her stomach has abdominal definition and she smokes a cigarette. She wraps her arm around me. She smells like alcohol and incense.

She pays my cover. The bouncer is a fat, bearded man who stares at me for too long as he marks both of my hands with giant black X’s. Most of the people are white and in their mid-twenties. A bar runs the length of one side of the building. A blonde who looks like she doesn’t know how not to be a bartender takes our orders. I ask for a Mr. Pibb. Talley giggles. The bartender tells me she could do a Coke with some grenadine and I tell her that sounds good. Talley has her hand on my back. I feel like an accessory. Somebody has body odor and I realize it’s Talley and this smell makes me think of love. She introduces me to a group of people. I don’t listen to their names because names don’t matter. More people crowd around the high-top. I feel badly for wanting Derek’s band to fail because that’s really about my own selfish fears. Old Cream plays from the speakers.

Talley turns to me. She digs around in her vintage clutch. She looks over both shoulders. She tells me to stick out my hand. I do. She places two capsules and some sort of hard candy in my palm.

It takes me a second to realize they’re drugs of some sort.

“What’s wrong?” Talley says.

“Nothing. I didn’t want anyone to see.”

“All the narcs, you mean?”

I nod

She laughs. She leans forward, kind of yelling into my ear that I’m paranoid. I want to tell her that people who’ve spent thirty months in locked rooms have the right to be paranoid, but I stay silent.

“Take them now. Derek will go on in like ten minutes. Timing will be perfect.”

The only drugs I’ve ever done were with the family. Every full moon, we sat around a campfire. The only people excused were those in the first two weeks of their treatments. We’d sit around with blankets, all of us staring into the fire, our shoulders touching, sometimes holding onto one another. One called it Reprieve. He said it wasn’t a shirking of Self because DMT, above all else, forced somebody against Truth. We’d sit there and we’d be silent and then we’d take our tin foil and then One would give us a sign and then we’d light the foil and we’d breathe in smoke, both the chemical-tasting smoke of the DMT and the thick smoke of the fire, and then we would experience Reprieve.

I ask Talley what the pills are.

“Molly. And the candy is an edible.”

I’ve never taken ecstasy and I’m not sure what it will do to me. At CMHIP, they preached the dangers of drugs with people who’ve experienced psychiatric trauma.

“It’s totally safe,” Talley says. She puts her arm around my waist. My elbow brushes against her flat belly. She needs me to approve of her life. Her choices. She needs me to have fun.

“I’ll help you through. Be at your side the whole time. You’ll love it, I swear.”

I glance down at Talley. Her nose is dotted with blackheads. I love this about her.

She says, “After all, I gave you a job…”

“You’re going to hold that over my head forever, aren’t you?”

“Until you realize the job sucks and quit, yes.”

I laugh.

Talley slips two pills into her mouth.

I’ve ingested worse things.

I swallow the pills and then eat the cherry candy.

We stand and stare at an empty stage. Talley bounces around from person to person. She comes back ten minutes later. She stands on her tiptoes and presses her mouth to my ear. I’d done the same to One my first night in Marble. I’d told him my first love, my favorite memory, and my biggest regret.

Talley says, “What about him?” She points across the bar. A skinny kid dressed in black stands next to a speaker. “I could totally see you together. Hot. It’d be a hot sight.”

Talley thinks I’m gay.

I guess this makes sense. It’s why she’d kept asking if I thought Derek was cute. It’s why she feels okay hanging all over me. It’s probably why she gave me a job at her shop. I’m about to correct her, when I stop myself, because it doesn’t matter. I am there to serve Tally and to give her what she needs from life because I have nothing and no one and everyone presents false Selves anyway.

“Too skinny,” I say.

“Really? Are you a chubby chaser?”

“A what?”

“A chubby chaser. You cruise for brutes?”

“I’m picky.”

“Top or bottom?”

I’d been both in juvie. It wasn’t rape and it wasn’t even true homosexuality. It was the need for intimacy inside of a system designed to alienate the already alienated. The sex had lasted for five days. My cellmate, Jerome, said if I told anyone he’d slit my throat. He ended up smashing my head against the wall three times on the sixth night. Evidently, he believed a preemptive strike was the best course of action. He told everyone I’d tried to touch his junk and then I was simply referred to as Faggot and then I quit talking and then I was transferred to CMHIP.

The truth is, I can be anyone Talley wants me to be. I can be any person anyone could ever want.

The band walks out of a side door and onto the stage raised two feet off the floor. Talley screams. Some people clap. Derek has a red guitar around his neck. I wonder if this is why Talley wore the red dress. Derek steps front and center. He thanks us for coming out. He calls us a bunch of cocksuckers. People like this. Sometimes people like to be insulted because it’s a form of validation of how they really see themselves. One didn’t say that, but it’s something he might have thought.

The music starts.

It’s too loud, all symbols and mumbled vocals. Talley dances with her hands raised, her head shaking back and forth, the synthetic edges of her hair brushing her chin. The song ends and then they play one that sounds the same. I know I’ll have a headache. The third song is a little different, the tempo slower, the drums muted. Derek sings. I listen to his words, something about love and true love and eternal love, and I look over at Talley and she beams the smile of a cherished little girl and then I yawn a big yawn that might have lasted an hour and then everything is amazing. The music no longer is too loud. I want it louder. I want it to fill my capillaries. I want to be touched. I want to be surrounded by more pressing bodies. I want to be given a sponge bath. I want to confess all of these wants and I want to not chastise myself for having desires.

I turn to Talley. She takes one look at me and giggles and then wraps her arms around me. My forehead is so close to pressing against hers.

“How you doing there, Mr. Hues?”

“I feel beautiful.”

“You are.”

We dance for a long while and my mind’s occupied with all the usual suspects of shame and sex and love, but there are new ones tossed in—seeing beauty for the first time in three years, believing myself capable of being something besides a sharer of secrets, the notion of friends who at least liked me—and I try the coping mechanisms they preached in CMHIP, the concentration on a particular color. Yellow, everything is yellow, lens flares and levity and new beginnings, the counting of my shallow breaths—in, two, three, four, out, two three, four—the repetition of a single word, love, love, love, and maybe this isn’t the best choice because I’m back sitting around a campfire being held by Five and she’s telling me I’m the strongest person she knows and beautiful and capable of greatness.