I've Been...

investigating a killing. The investigation's been all-consuming for the past month—sorry to neglect you here. When the story is published, you'll be the first to know. And when I'm done researching and writing the piece—probably in about a week—I'll resume here.

Fight

I just applied for an internship at McSweeney's. I hope, after the interview, my snake is small.

Mud-Red Rum

The Guyana coast, dusk. Slate sky streaked with stratus clouds, red-grey and low over the horizon. Turquoise water shimmers in the pre-storm light; the mud-red clouds darken and expand, invade the slate-sky-cool. We walk barefoot, Justin and I, stepping from smooth rock to seaweed to shell-ruins on the damp shore-sand. Slow. Lime-green seaweed, slimy between my toes and foreign. Prehistoric.

The clouds dissipate outward like smoke—fade; the electric sky-light dims to night. Justin slips his hand under my arm, grabs my arm. Squeezes it, playful. I smile, pull away. Undress.

“What are you doing?”

“Nobody’s here,” I say.

“What?” Justin picks my t-shirt up, shakes out the sand. He throws it at me, expecting me to catch. I let it hit me. I’m cold.

“Let’s get married here,” I say.

“What?”

“Let’s get married in Guyana.”

Justin looks at me—at my eyes. “Will it count?”

“Think so,” I say. I shiver.

Justin smiles, picks my shirt up again.

“I love you,” I say. The whole plane ride—the whole week—I hadn’t told him. I normally tell him every day. “Why’d we come here?”

“I love you.”

I exhale, long and necessary, put my shirt on. My skin is cold. I feel like I’ve won the lottery but don’t want Justin to know. Justin is the jackpot, he doesn’t know.

We walk, hand in hand, to town.

Through town. Rum and gold. Molasses and diamonds. No, I don’t want to buy anything. I’m sorry I’m a tourist—Guyana would be cleaner without tourism.

I’m embarrassed I’m a tourist.

At the end of a residential street we find a club, loud and colorful. Regina Spektor sings “Fidelity.” El Dorado Rum here! The song ends. We enter—cologne and beads and alcohol—and Dispatch plays now, “Flying Horses.”

Justin buys rum.

I drink rum.

I dance, alone and without Justin and with a man with beads in his hair, dark and thirty-something. I have no idea what he is. He speaks Guyanese Creole. I wish I could see a thirty-minute film: His Life Condensed. The beads blur like colored gas.

He slips his hand up my skirt, into my underwear. He fingers me.

I pull away. “Justin!” I am cold and tight.

The beads are gas, then cold gems, gleaming in the slow-club light. “Marco!”

I listen.

No Polo.

North

Justin and I sit in the car—This American Life is on—and float through a neighborhood like Collin’s neighborhood. Too-big houses, gardens, landscaped yards with hedges and fountains. An ocean-view. My heart clenches. We haven’t said a word.

His right hand rests on his thigh, veins bulging. Fingers swollen. I move my hand through the car-air and place it on his.

“Where were you,” Justin says. My hand jumps and lands, now on his thigh.

“Can we get some fresh air.” I roll down my window.

“You farted.”

“No.” Maybe he was making a joke? I try to laugh—a raspy burst. Harsh.

He jerks his leg away.

“I’m sorry,” I say. We’re on the highway, flying north. Where are we going? “Do you like the roses?”

“No.” He is smiling now. He slips his hand between my thighs. My thigh-vein throbs. I feel like I’ve just cried, or orgasmed.

I grab the rose-bunch, prick my palm. Toss it out the window, onto 101.

Justin laughs. Trees retreat behind us, to the dim blue horizon. The highway rises and turns, hugs the ocean, the water sun-gold-huge. The moon floats like a ghost—hangs over the glowing ocean like a translucent insect on a bright stem, eating the stem away.

“Where we going?”

Want surges through my crotch like water out of a hose-tear. My legs tingle.

The sky to the east darkens, a clear, bright navy. The air cools. West, over the ocean, a hundred black seagulls swoop and dip in the gold-blue-huge. “Where are we going, Justin?”

For Justin

No one is looking at me, I don’t think, so I twist Attorney Mason R. Madison’s rosebush branch. It bends, doesn’t snap. I prick my hand in two places, bleed on a yellow rose, the green-brown stem. A dog barks. My hand cramps.

I step away from the bush, off the lawn. The blue air touches my thorn-pricks like a cool hand. My palm tingles. I feel brave.

It takes an hour to drive from Berkeley to Marin; I have time. I wander the sky-lit sidewalks, find a pharmacy—Marin Drug and Candy. The roof is Spanish tile, a thousand terracotta arches, a hundred-thousand dollars. The door: yellow ivy grips a red clay archway, an arch I’d get married under. Mint leaves grow behind the stone seagull. I’m underdressed.

The floor is marble. I buy a box of Band-Aids and gardening shears. And an apron.

I tie the apron on and rip the cardboard off the shears and I am a gardener. My name is—Tammy. This is my job.

I walk back to the rose bush, clip off fifteen roses. Two women with loose skin pass—they both have pearl earrings—and I wave my shears. They don’t smile.

The sky dims, soft as honeydew rot, and the sun creeps behind a house, backlights the greenhouse. The greenhouse hosts a forest of foreign plants, black and twisted before the pale sky-dawn.

I untie my apron. “Justin! You smell like basil,” I say to my face in a flower shop’s dark window. I wish I had a ribbon for the roses. My phone rings. 

They were cheap at that store, not to offer a ribbon.

Escape to Dolce Vita

Marin, California. I walk down the winding street, past large houses with green lawns and an empty tennis court. The ocean rests below like an extension of the sky, pale blue and foggy. I’m wearing my high heels, last night’s dress and vest. I wish I had sunglasses. I take my heels off, carry them.

An hour of walking—southeast, I think—and I’m at the town center: a few quaint restaurants, a small grocery store. A sun-bleached Victorian—Mason R. Madison, Attorney at Law—with a yellow rose bush. An art gallery.

I start to cry.

I call Justin.

“Hi?” He’s somewhere loud. I want to ask where.

I step over bird poop—the bottom of my feet are now black—and onto a restaurant’s lawn. A man walking tiny poodle asks me where Dolce Vita is—how he can get to Dolce Vita Wine Bar. I ignore him. “I bought you roses,” I lie.

Justin doesn’t care about flowers; I do. He’d rather have a sandwich or a free movie ticket. “Yellow roses, they smell like summer,” I say.

I slip my feet into my high heels.

To Be Houdini

I lie alone in Collin’s glass-stone home, Lily’s house. Mommy’s house.

Collin’s bed.

I turn on the TV, the local morning news—Prince William is engaged—and then the national news: a little girl in Texas is missing, Prince William is engaged.

I want to see more me-news—more Basecamp Berkeley hate. I want the story. The ocean’s doily edge flows out then fades then widens, like a pupil in inconsistent light. Sunlight saturates the shore’s wet sand; the window-wall frames the day, white-hot and quiet. The sea-fog glows. I go online.

I search “buy-cott Basecamp Berkeley.” Nothing. “Basecamp Berkeley hate.” Nothing. “Kay Ryan escape.” This:

Houdini

Each escape

involved some art,

some hokum, and

at least a brief

incomprehensible

exchange between

the man and metal

during which the

chains were not

so much broken

as he and they

blended. At the

end of each such   

mix he had to

extract himself. It

Was the hardest

part to get right

routinely: breaking

back into the   

same Houdini.

I’m engaged. I imagine calling Justin now—ending it. Or calling Collin. Lily is confused. I want to extract myself from Justin like a needle from fabric, a hand from water. Or not from Justin, from Berkeley. I love Justin. Like play-doh loves hands. I am pl—

My phone rings. “Hello?” 

Breaking back.