Chapter One

His dealer was a fat man, over 500 pounds. Randy said he had already lost 200 this year, which meant once he was 700 pounds and couldn't move around the house. And she felt bad that every day she felt self conscious going to the gym, when here was this guy going to the gym every day like he was, with his stomach down to his knees, and she felt that must be an act of bravery equivalent to penetrating into an enemy bunker. He sat on the couch, and didn't get up to say hello, just sat there, phone on one side, x box controller on the other. He was the kind of fat man who was really tall, but so fat that he actually looked like he should be short. His arms were long, and the forearms were skinny. They were scarecrow arms sticking out of his orange t-shirt. His blond fluffy mullet hung like bunny bangs in front of his eyes. Everything on his body seems pulled and pushed apart, he had been gone at with a meat tenderizer and left for spoiled.

The thing was, every time you went over there, you had to hang out a few hours. He didn't like too much traffic. So she had to sit there with Randy and try to look this big boy doll in the face while he was speaking. Only thing was, she knew how bad she was at hiding her thoughts, and she thought for sure that little sneer of disgust trying to be a smile was obvious on her face. So she spent as much of the conversation as she could looking at the back of Randy's head, or staring at the tv screen, which was just the x-box screen and didn't lend much of an excuse.

The whole bag was shake. It made sense, when you sell pounds, then there are large amounts of shake, and he put more in there cause he thought it was for Randy. Also, he spent an hour picking out all the seeds and stems. He really liked Randy.

Everything was in boxes still, he had just moved. She wanted to watch him unpack those boxes, those elephantine thighs rumbling around the room, the mass of skin and suet crawling, a jello lizard behemoth, a late descendant of primeval reptilians. He was a man trapped in liquid suspension.

Later, She sat at the computer desk, headphones on, mug of ice water beside the monitor. She was listening to Tchaikovsky, having bought that day two collections of him, plus one double disk of “50 Classical Performances”, the kind of thing you found cheap that invariably had “Flight of the Bumblebee”, and “The Nutcracker, Op.71.ACT II, Scene III, No.12:Divertissement. Trepak (Russian Dance)”. She realized this was all a cliche, the blocked writer, high as fuck, desperately trying to write something with glow, the night before a deadline. But as a cliche it felt full and useful. She had even gone to McDonalds to get ice cream, it was sitting in the freezer. That also felt useful.

Outside the ghetto birds were buzzing away. The spring night air required a sweatshirt, which was the best kind of air. The blood was rushed to her fingertips, she saw them turn circulatory red, patched with veins, the frosted nail polish gleaming harsh against the swollen skin. She closed her eyes with the cellos and the cars, and began to type. She wasn’t entirely sure what she typing, but it sounded good, the words seemed thick and firm. Sometimes she could smell the difference between good and bad. Good words smelled like tangerine and mango, with a base of gold and jewels all wrapped up in white cotton. Bad words smelled like steel rooms, green hallways, romance novels in waiting rooms that have recently been cleaned with Clorox. She thought about how rooms in the Pledge commercials always looked like they smelled. Gold and rich, with sparkling dust motes in the air, warm from the overpowering sunshine. That comforting summer baked smell. An intense feeling of comfort, thinking about those designer rooms, she pictured houses in Nantucket with wide porches, kitchens in Minnesota with red flowered curtains, patios with golden retrievers and begonias. In every pictures, the pitcher of lemonade on the counter or table, the plate of cookies. The cat sleeping, the small child playing. The perfectly washed floors. The nicely arranged rows of knickknacks, magazines, pots and pans gleaming.

She did this so if he ever decided to talk to her again, he could find her. She did things like that all the time, it was a game she would play with herself. At work she pictured him walking in some day. Outside smoking a cigarette she looked in passing cars trying to see if he was in one. She didn’t know what kind of new car he had, so she would play “What kind of car do I think he would drive” at the bus stop in the morning. But she never once thought about calling him, or writing him another unanswered e-mail. He hadn’t been around at all for months at this point. He had become in her head a storybook character, a memory already stripped of flesh and blood. When she thought about him, it was without a face. The details of the room instead maybe, or sounds. But never him. She had gone at her nostalgia with a pair of scissors, and someday she would throw them all into a mental drawer in the linen closet, to be lost.

Caring about someone is like letting them rent out a piece of your brain. They get this tiny small section, and the longer you know them, the more space they start to take up. So first they add a few light fixtures, some new shrubbery, then all of sudden they're talking about second bathrooms and new garages. When you break off a relationship with someone, friend, family, lover, or otherwise, you're evicting them. Or maybe they break the lease and move themselves, cause they think you're charging too much. Either way, you're stuck with this empty property, and you have to tear most of it down. But the first room they ever had will always still be there, and maybe they scratched something in the woodwork, or cursed it, but you can never ever get another tenant in there. They just don't fit. No matter how much time goes by, you can always just go sit in that room and it will be like they never left. This might seem cynical to some people, but she liked having all those empty rooms in her head, it gave her lots of options. Everyone decorates differently, so it's kind of exciting and eccentric. Sometimes she took her mental typewriter into a certain room and wrote letters to the former tenant that she never sent, because it was familiar and comfortable. But at the same time, it's good to know when to evict them, cause you can't have them taking over the whole goddamn house.

She saw herself calling him on the phone. She saw him answering, and her telling him to listen to what she had written. Then she read him the most beautiful twelve lines in the world, a perfect poem, a rare shining jewel among poems, the kind to make young girls cry and queens fall in love, as if those kind of people had an appreciation for literature. In the vision, she saw herself saying “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever written, and you had to hear it first.” And he would tell her he loved her. And it would be perfect. A perfect moment. She could even feel the expression she would make on her face. She could see the light in his eyes, hear the Prokofiev in the background. And then she would write a novel based on their lives together, the first time and the second time, and even if it ended badly again, it would still be dreadfully romantic.

So she stopped typing for a minute and read what she had written.

In the beginning
A boy fell in love with a girl. The girl had big black eyes.
The girl who was a kraken said:
In the beginning I was floating in the darkness and the light would dance on my purple skin and I would push myself through the currents on long white arms.
And there was a speck floating in the darkness with me, following my wake, it was a tiny rock. And on this tiny rock were lots of tiny tiny creatures, and they lives tiny tiny lives and they worked hard and died and melted glaciers. And they had a god, his name was God. I could hear him talking to them as I floated along besides. But he never talked to me.
And one day I took a very big gulp and the little rock was swallowed.
God was angry, and he took away my purple skin and he took away my long white arms and he locked me in a tiny shell, with only my big black eyes. And there I stayed for ages and ages, with no light and no dark and no current.

The girl who is only a girl with big black eyes says:
And now I am here.
I sleep with a warm back and ankles entwined.
In the back of my throat there has been a trickle of blood all day. You can't tell when I brush my teeth, but when I bit his arm there was a circle of blood and it wasn't his. I can taste it when I swallow. It’s filling up my stomach. I’m never hungry.
I must be careful not to swallow the world or he will lock me up again. I must be careful.

Beings who can only relate to each other through symbolic representation are doomed to be imaginary forever.