The New Black (16 page)

He stopped struggling abruptly, just hanging there, eyes closed, water trickling into his mouth. Only his chin and the tips of his fingers floated clear. I reached the edge and extended a hand. The supporting ridge broke away and my chest and head slipped below the surface. Cold black water pressed against my eyeballs. I caught movement through the brown water and grabbed something—smooth and slim, perhaps a jacket sleeve—but the cold made my fingers clumsy and it slipped through. The lake shoved me back and forth, currents stronger than I'd imagined. Sinewy shapes turned over in the murk, shapes like seal pups at play.

I broke the surface snorting streams of water, wiping away cords of snot. I stared into the swirling blackness in search of movement, a leg kicking, fingers grasping. I plunged my arm in, stirring around, hopeful: a few strands of eelgrass draped over numb fingers. Not knowing what to do, I called his name. “Jake!” The word echoed uselessly across the flat expanse.

When my voice died away I heard it: a sustained resonant thump. I couldn't tell where it came from. The ice trembled. A dark form was pressed to the chalky sheet a few feet to the left, trapped beneath the surface. It twisted and thrashed, beating the ice.

I crawled towards the shape—crawled on my hands and knees like a fucking
infant
. Ice pocked with craters and boils from thawing and re-freezing. I saw a dim outline down there, a creature of crude lines and angles. The ice shuddered; fresh-fallen snow jumped off the surface, resettling. My fingers spread across the milky whiteness and ears plugged with frozen lake water, a frantic buzzing between.

I made a fist with my right hand and brought it down. The ice buckled, splintered, but held. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, a white-hot bolt. I raised the right again—my lead hand, the dynamite right—smashing the ice. It broke and my fist plunged into the darkness, grasping frantically, closing on nothing. A powerful current caught hold of Jake and he drifted sideways, beyond my grasp. Something passed through my fingers—a bootlace?

I tracked the shape beneath the ice. The freezing water on my arms crackled like dull metal. My teeth chattered and I called his name. Maybe I was screaming.

Passing beneath a patch of perfectly clear, glasslike ice, I caught his face through the scalloped sheet. Lips and nostrils robin's egg blue, the rest a creamy shade of gray. Cheek flattened to the ice, the buoyancy of flesh pushing him up. Eyes so blue, luminously blue, pearlescent air bubbles clinging to the dark lashes. A sinuous white flash below, silky curve of a trout's belly.

My right hand was badly broken: knuckles split and flesh peeled to the wrist, a lot of blood, some bones. I slammed my left hand down. The ice fractured in a radiating spiderweb. Water shot up through the fissures. My hand shattered like a china plate. Didn't feel a thing at the time. Jake stopped clawing, stopped thumping. His eyes open but rolled to the whites beneath the fine network of cracks. I hammered my left hand down once more, breaking into the icy shock of the lake. I snagged his hood but the hole was too small so I clawed with my free hand, breaking off chunks, razored edges gashing my fingers to the bone.

Finally the hole was wide enough for me to pull him through. A long swipe of mud on Jake's forehead, hair stuck up in rapidly freezing corkscrews. His nose broken and me who'd done it, smashing ice into his face. I gathered him in my arms and stumbled uphill to the house. “Please,” I remember saying, over and over, a breathy whisper.
“Please.”

Ernie Munger, a flyweight mending a broken rib, had spent a few summers as a lifeguard. He administered CPR while the cook rang for help. Munger's thick hands pumped the brackish water from Jake's lungs, pumped life back into him. Jake was breathing by the time the paramedics arrived. They snaked a rubber tube down his throat. Afterwards I stood by a large bay window overlooking the lake. The hole, the size of a dime from that distant vantage, was freezing over in the evening chill; tiny red pinpricks represented my bloody handprints on the ice. The splintered bones pulsed: I'd broken forty-five of fifty-four.

I push off the floor and lean against a sawhorse, waiting for the teeth to align and the gears to mesh again. Nicodemus circles somewhere to the left, dancing side to side, weaving through blue shafts of shadow like animate liquid. Some bastard kicks me in the spine, “Get up and fight, you pitiful son of a bitch.” Standing, I wonder how long was I down. Eight seconds? No ref, so nobody's counting. A pair of hands clutch my shoulders, shoving, the same voice saying, “Get out there, chickenshit.” I strike back with an elbow, impacting something fleshy and forgiving. A muted crack. Those hands fall away.

Nicodemus advances and hits me in the face. He grabs a handful of hair and bends me over the sawhorse, pummeling with his lead hand. The skin above my eyes comes apart, soft meat tearing away from the deeply seamed scar tissue. Blood sprays in a fine mist. I blink away red and smack him in the kidneys. He pulls back, nursing his side. Knuckling the blood out of my eyes, I move in throwing jabs. Nicodemus's skull is oddly planed, a tank turret, deflecting my punches. His fists are bunched in front of his mouth, arms spread in an invert funnel leading to the point of his chin: a perfect opening, but not yet. Reaching blindly, he entangles my arms, pulling me to his chest. He rubs his hand wraps across my eyes and I wince at the turpentine sting. I snap an uppercut, thumping him under
the heart.

The hospital room walls were glossy tile, windows inlaid with wire mesh. Jake lay in an elevated hospital bed, shirtless, chest stuck with EKG discs. Outside a heavy mist fell, making a nimbus around the moon and stars. Teddy'd visited the emergency ward earlier, taking one look at my hands and saying I'd never box again. I was on Dilaudid for pain, Haldol for hysteria. My mind was stark and bewildered. A machine helped Jake breathe. His father sat beside the bed, gripping his hand.

“Is he—will he be all right?” “He's alive, Ed.”

Steve'd never called me that before. Always Eddie. “Is he…will he wake up soon?”

“Nobody can say. There was…damage. Parts shutting down. I don't know, exactly.”

“We were…holding hands. He broke away. He'd never done that before. It was so strange. We were holding hands, then he didn't want to do that anymore. It's only human. I let him go. It was okay. I thought, He's growing up, and that's okay.”

Steve smoothed the white sheets over Jake's legs. “The golden hour. It's…a period of time. Three minutes, three-and-a-half. The amount of time the brain can survive without oxygen. Only a few minutes, but the doctor called it the golden hour. So…stupid.”

“I'm so sorry.”

Steve didn't look at me. His hands smoothed the sheets.

I stalk Nicodemus, keeping left, outside his range. His eyes shot with streaks of red, their wavering gaze fixated on the darkness beyond me. I stab forward, placing weight on my lead foot and twisting sharply at the hip, left hand rising towards the point of his chin.

When I was a kid, a rancher with a lizard problem paid a dime for every one I killed. I stuffed geckos in a sack and smashed the squirming burlap with a rock.

When my fist hits Nicodemus it sounds an awful lot like those geckos.

The punch forces his jawbone into his neck, spiking a big bundle of nerves. My hand shatters on impact, bones breaking down their old fault lines. Nicodemus's eyes flutter uncontrollably as he falls backward. He falls in defiance of gravity, body hanging on a horizontal plane, arms at his sides, palms upraised. There's a strange look on his face. Not a smile, not exactly, but close. A peaceful expression.

Jake's twenty years old now. Comatose fifteen years. Were it not for a certain slackness of features he'd be a handsome young man. He grows a wispy beard, which his mother shaves with an electric razor. I've visited a few times over the years. I sat beside the bed holding his hand, so much larger than the one I held all those years ago. He smiled at the sound of my voice and laughed at one of our shared jokes. Maybe just nerves and old memories. Every penny I make goes to him. Gail and Steve take it because they can use it, and because they know I need to give it.

There are other ways. I know that. You think I don't know that? This is the only way that feels right.

Nicodemus rises to one knee. He looks like something risen from its crypt, shattered jaw hanging lopsidedly, bloodshot eyes albino-red. Pain sings in my broken hand and I vaguely remember a song my mother used to sing when I was very young, sitting on her lap as she rocked me to sleep, beautiful foreign words sung softly into my hair.

He makes his way across the ring and I dutifully step forward to meet him. We stand facing each other, swaying slightly. My eyes swelled to slits and he moves in a womb of mellow amber light.

And I see this:

A pair of young-old eyes opening, the clear blue of them. A hand breaking up from sucking black water, fist smashed through the ice sheet and a body dragging itself to the surface. A boy lying on the ice in the ashy evening light, lungs drawing clean winter air, eyes oriented on a sky where even the palest stars burn intensely after such lasting darkness. I see a man walking across the lake from the west, body casting a lean shadow. He offers his hand: twisted and rheumatoid, a talon. The boy's face smooth and unlined, preserved beneath the ice; the man's face a roadmap of knots and scar tissue and poorly knitted bones. For a long moment, the boy does not move. Then he reaches up, takes that hand. The man clasps tightly; the boy gasps at the fierceness of his grip. I see them walking towards a distant house. Squares of light burning in odd windows, a crackling fire, blankets, hot chocolate. The man leans down and whispers something. The boy laughs—a beautiful, snorting laugh, fine droplets of water spraying from his nose. They walk together. Neither leads or follows. I see this happening. I still hold a belief in this possibility.

We circle in a dimming ring of light, feet spread, fists balled, knees flexed. The crowd recedes, as do the noises they are making. The only sound is a distant subterranean pound, the beat of a giant's heart. Shivering silver mist falls through the holes in the roof and that coldness feels good on my skin.

Nicodemus steps forward on his lead foot, left hand sweeping in a tight downwards orbit, flecks of blood flying off his brow as his head snaps with the punch. I come forward on my right foot, stepping inside his lead and angling my head away from his fist but not fast enough, tensing for it while my right hand splits his guard, barely passing through the narrowing gap and I'm torquing my shoulder, throwing everything I've got into it,
kitchen-sinking
the bastard, and, for a brilliant split second in the center of that darkening ring, we meet.

T
he wheels of the jogging stroller squeak with every turn, timing the anxiety in my chest, making me think of rum rushing from the bottle to a glass. Cold and refreshing. It's the sort of thought that jogging can't push away.

Every run uphill makes me feel like I'm starting over.

My calves throb. There's a heat wave in my throat, making every exhale a cough. I wipe at the sweat on my face, smearing the cover-up on my lip.

“Shit.”

The baby starts crying. Leaning over the handle of the stroller, I reach out and touch her cheek. Her eyes close tight and her mouth gapes. Her screeches fill my ears.

“Please stop,” I gasp.

She doesn't. I turn the stroller around, the summer heat bearing down on my walk back home. The squeaking wheels and the baby's wails force me to shut my eyes. Even the speed bump at the entrance to the townhouse complex feels like a burden.

“Hey, there. Hey!” It's a male voice calling.

I turn around and the new neighbour jogs past. He's wearing a navy blue shirt and white jogging shorts. A sweatband pushes his brown hair back. “Hey,” he says again, jogging on the spot. “You okay? You don't look so great. You look beat, just totally beat.”

He's tall, lean. He scratches at his beard. His pupils are dilated, but I can still see that his eyes are the colour of Blue Hawaii, the first drink I ever had. All I can think of is the chilled pineapple sweetness as my gaze trickles down. He's sweating, and the fabric of his shirt clings to his chest.

My fingers tense around the stroller.

He's got a water bottle. He rotates it in his grasp, spinning circles so fast that the water clings to the sides. “You live right there, right?” he asks, pointing. “I know because I saw you. You were in the window with that other girl. You were watching me move all my shit.”

“That was my sister, Marie,” I say. “I live with her and her baby. She just went back to work after her maternity leave.”

“You should come in,” he says, paying no attention to the crying infant in the stroller. “You're not busy, right? I can show you my place.”

“I don't know,” I say, looking at him.

“Come on.” He jogs backwards, his smile too nice, eyes so intense like Blue Hawaii vacation excitement. “Come on,” he urges. “You can have a glass of water. I promise I'll make it cold and relieving. I promise. I guarantee, even.”

X

There's an ant's nest beside his front door, a swarm of black spots crawling around my feet. Inside, his place is barren, the boxes still taped up, stacked beside his kitchen counter. There's a couch in the living room. The suede clings to the sweat on my thighs when I sit down.

He gets me a glass of water and he sits beside me, watching me while I drink. “You had a cleft lip,” he says.

“What?”

“You did at one point, didn't you?” He rubs at his nose, sniffing. “I mean, it doesn't look like it, but I can see the scar.”

My hand flinches, touching the uneven skin. He catches my wrist, his palm hot, sweaty. I jerk my hand away.

“I'm sorry,” he says. He laughs, reaching out again, rubbing his thumb over the scar. “I've seen all those pictures of babies with cleft lips. It's crazy that those kids can look so normal, isn't it?”

“I guess,” I say. The scar throbs and I stare down at the floor, thinking like ants are crawling around my feet, flashbacks of my first memories: learning to speak without slurring or spewing spit, trying to explain to classmates why my mouth was so ugly, all that social withdrawal sewn up inside my restructured upper lip. It's hard to breathe. I turn my head and take a drink. The water's cold but it doesn't provide the right kind of relief.

“Do you want to do something?” He leans forward, hands shaking, edging toward my leg. “Do you want to fuck?” he asks.

My fingers slip against the condensation on the glass.

“Sex is just the best when I'm high,” he says. “It feels so fucking good.”

I shift, feeling his grasp on my thigh. “What are you high on?”

His lips curl into a smile. “It's coke,” he says. “It makes me want to fuck you so fucking hard.” He fingers at the leg of my shorts, pinching the fabric.

My gaze drifts to the baby, now asleep. Her head's slumped forward. Her eyes are closed and her mucus-filled nose makes sounds every time she breathes in and out, dazed, dreaming.

He leans in. I can smell his cologne, mixed with perspiration, sweet and salty, something new, something different. I set the glass down on the floor. “You have to be quiet,” I say. “You can't wake her, okay?”

He's got a face beyond my league, but he kisses me, eager. His tongue probes past the scar, slipping in deep. A gasp slips up my throat and my limbs go loose, veins running hot, heart throbbing. This is what everything used to feel like when I first started drinking. No tension, just a black hole to fill with anything.

“My name's Ian,” he says, climbing over me on the couch. His shaking fingers slide under my shirt, tickling my stomach. He stares me down, his big eyes just dark holes with blue edges. He's somewhere else, somewhere better. He kisses me again, thick saliva in my throat, taking me with him.

He pulls at my clothes, pulls his shorts down so he can shove his dick between my legs. “You're so fucking wet,” he says, grabbing my knees, pushing himself in. “Fuck,” he says, his voice forced, shouting. “You fucking like me, don't you? You fucking want me, don't you, baby?”

He wakes the baby. The cries squeal like the stroller wheels.

I shut my eyes as I smooth my palms over his chest, feeling the rapid pace of his heartbeat, the pulsing throbs. Under him, everything else is hard to hear.

X

When Marie comes home from work, I sit up straight in the couch, holding the baby, pretending there's nothing to hide.

“I met the new neighbour today,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” She sets her purse down on the table.

“His name's Ian,” I say. “He's really nice. He showed me his place.”

She looks at me. My lip itches and I rub it with my wrist, sniffing. I can still smell the sweat on my skin.

“How was Emma today?” she asks, taking the baby.

“Fussy,” I say. “I don't think she likes jogging, the motion of it. I don't think it does anything for her.”

X

At night Ian follows me, chases me through the dirt trail beside the highway. The sun beats down on my skin. I can barely run, and he tackles me into the sagebrush, the dirt scraping my knees. There's an ant's nest beside my face.

“What did your mouth look like?” he asks.

“I don't remember,” I say. “My mom never took pictures of me.”

“It was probably a hole you could slip right into,” he says. He slides two fingers into the nest and the ants crawl out. I realize he's naked, that I'm naked. I wince, arching myself against his hard-on. He enters me, invades me, and I gasp, the ants finding a new home in my mouth, crawling inside.

I wake up in my bedroom. There's nothing but black outside the tiny window, and I lay there, looking at the shadows, the comfort of them.

X

I put the baby in the stroller, her little mouth filled with a pacifier so she's quiet, non-existent. I walk across the parking lot and knock on Ian's door. He's shaved off his beard and his face is marked with little red nicks. His skin looks sallow. He looks at me with empty blue eyes. There's a plastic bottle of white powder clutched in his hand. I push the stroller in and close the door.

“I just want to do another line,” he says. “That's all I ever want to do. That's all I can think about.” His voice is low, quiet, the way mine used to sound when going out stopped being about blended drinks and partying, when it became solely about booze, its influence feeding my veins.

“It's better to talk than to keep it all in,” I say.

“What does it matter to you?”

“I was an alcoholic,” I say. “I know what it's like.”

He stares.

“It's still hard, trying not to think about drinking, knowing it's not an option. Everything's harder now.” My gaze drops and I lean my head against his chest, breathing in, inhaling the scent of him.

His fingers curl around the bottle. “The first time I did it, I felt like angels were in the walls, talking to me, giving me energy and powers. Now the highs never last as long. I never know what to do. Every time I come down, I can't even...I can't do anything.”

“You can't be in denial,” I say, “You're only going to feel worse.” My lip twitches. He watches me rub at the scar. “I tried to cut it open once,” I say. “Marie found me in the bathroom with a knife. I told her there was nowhere else for the bullshit to go. The hole had to get bigger. She started crying then. She didn't know what to say. Nobody ever did.”

His hand starts shaking, clutching the bottle like a tiny martini shaker. The powder inside looks like drink froth.

“There's no point taking it out on yourself,” I say. “It's better when you're not alone.”

He pours a bump on his wrist and he snorts it back. His chest heaves in and out. He looks at me, his lips tight, eyes wide, hot. He smiles. Blue Hawaii vacation relief.

I want it. I want him.

X

Marie wakes me up, walking into my bedroom with the baby wailing in her arms. “Where's Emma's pacifier?” she asks. “You had it this morning. She can't fall asleep without it.”

“I don't know” I say. “Maybe it fell out at Ian's place.”

“What?” Her face is blurry in the dark. “You went
there again?”

“I was talking with him. What's wrong with that?”

“You're supposed to be looking after Emma,” she says.

“I get bored sometimes,” I say. “What do you expect, that I'm just going to sit by myself all day trying to get her to talk?”

Marie groans. “I'm not having this argument now,” she says. She slams the door, but it doesn't mask the sound of the baby's colic cries.

X

Ian never unpacks. He tells me that he's started selling stuff to pay for more cocaine. He's so high, so excited, stubble on his face. He lets his beard grow back.

I buy pacifiers. There's a bag of them on his kitchen counter. The baby cries and I pop one in. Her mouth is so pretty, so perfect. Her lips close around the pacifier and she falls asleep like a normal person. Then Ian does another line.

Every climb up to his bedroom makes me feel like I'm starting over. Blue Hawaii vacation refreshment.

X

He doesn't have a bed. There's just a mattress on the floor, and it squeaks like the baby's stroller when he fucks me on it. He's shaved again. The scabs are thick, dark, almost black, like tiny ants are crawling on his face. His nostrils are lined in red.

His room smells like sweat and bile and aftermath. Sickness. His dick slips in, going hard, fast, deep, until I'm moaning, feeling cramps in my abdomen. He groans, pulling out, gushing all over my torso. He rubs his hands over the sticky white, slides two fingers into my mouth, making me taste him.

“Don't you like me?” he asks. “Don't you want me?”

He pries my lip up, right where the scar is. “What's it like, knowing you were born with all the ugly on the outside?” His voice is aggressive. “Don't you ever just want to cut yourself open again, make another fucking hole?”

I feel like insects are crawling in my veins.

“It used to be so different,” he says, voice cracking.

I wince, but I can't shake him off. He clings to me, bearing his nails against my skin so they feel like tiny bites, stinging all over. His groan echoes, turns into a cough. My lip throbs.

“It's never like it used to be,” he says, his eyes turning red, blinking, tears slipping. It's like a Blue Hawaii vacation gone awry.

He starts crying, deep moans that sound stuck in his throat. It's how I imagine my cries sounding when I was a baby, when my mouth was still a gaping open mess. I crawl away from him, his sweetness diluted on my tongue.

X

I watch him from the living room window, holding the baby. She cries and I rock her, watching Ian as he bends down over the doorstep, a can of aerosol can of insect killer clutched in his unsteady hand.

Marie comes home.

“Jessica, are you okay?”

I shake my head, my fingers flinching, the baby slipping. Marie takes her, pats her back. She looks out the window.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I relapsed.”

Marie looks at me.

“I'm not going back there. I just wanted to feel like I used to.”

“What is going on?” she asks.

I shake my head, tight-lipped. Outside, Ian turns, looking up at the window, at me, nothing but black filling his gaze. I look away.

X

Emma wakes me, crying again. There's blue behind the white sheer of the curtains. Dawn. Marie's in the living room, trying to soothe the baby back to sleep. She doesn't even notice me.

“I can take her,” I say.

“Huh?” Marie blinks, looking up.

“Go to bed,” I say. “I can take her for you.”

Emma settles in my arms, her cries fading. Her skin's warm and soft, her tiny infant fingers reaching out. In the daylight, her eyes glisten bright blue. Normal.