The Quiet Parts FINALE
FIFTEENTH STORY
“Jason? Things are great with him! He is just a sweetie. Sometimes I think we might be moving a little fast but, you know what, I’ll just tell you. We’re buying land together! You know how I told you I helped him come out to his parents? That convinced them to let him open his trust fund. We’re buying a farm in southern Oregon.
“I am so grateful for my time in the city. I met the love of my life in Oakland. I grew from a girl to a woman. But I’m over the rat race. Cities are a cesspool, really. I am ready to return to nature. I am ready to go north.
“My ex Andre? The one who said those hurtful things? He was kind of right. He called me a meme, but I was if you think about it. My whole life I’ve been telling myself I’m a good person who does good things. But what is good? Did I ever want to be good or did I do what society told me to do? Look around the Bay. It’s all people saying how good they are. It is a meme. Good isn’t good. It’s limiting. It’s moralistic. And in no way does it speak to the true light and shadow we all carry. What this ordeal has taught me is I’m not good. I’m flawed, complex, and nuanced. And I love that.
“Still poly/kinky/queer! Just in love with a cismale, ha. Still a feminist! But something just feels so right about being a traditional woman who stands by her man. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still hella work I have to do on myself. I was doing drugs hella hard this summer and I’m learning to moderate.”
“So is this goodbye?” asks her therapist Dr. Alison, a tall and handsome brunette, Sigourney Weaver gone hippie. She wears a teal tank top and loose purple pants, and the two of them sit on the rainbow rug with their legs tucked under them. For three weeks Dr. Alison has been her therapist, ever since Dr. Kenya started to piss her off. Leigh looks out the window at the Marina. A peaceful scene worth driving to Berkeley for.
Dr. Alison asks, “What work do you want to do going forward?”
Leigh appreciates her guiding questions, typical practice in the Hakushi Method of Purposeful Intimate Therapy. Better than Dr. Kenya’s sarcastic looks when she thought Leigh wasn’t watching. Leigh breathes in the ocean air. “Be,” she says.
“Namaste,” says Dr. Alison.
Effervescence carries Leigh across the parking lot to Jason’s truck, which she has borrowed while he makes preparations. The sun feels good on her arms, exposed in a sleeveless sky-blue summer dress she wears with straw wedge sandals. On the highway she reminisces on her years in Oakland. From the halls, to San Leandro schools, to Top/Bottom, to protesting, she wouldn’t change a thing.
Parked outside the house, she enters to find Jason on a ladder in the magic hall, finishing up the arcane symbols he’s painting on the ceiling. To her surprise and delight, the dork is wearing black slippers, a black square hat made from gauze and string-tied under his chin, and a dark blue robe with white borders, crossed from left to right over his paunch and tied with a white sash. He looks like the chubby magistrate in a kung fu flick who gets kicked in the face by the bad guy.
“Is today Cultural Insensitivity Day?” she asks snidely, a touch affectionate.
“Alvin says the spells work best the more seriously you take them,” he grumps. “This is the dress of an Immortal, and it cost me a lot so you better not laugh. Alvin’s a cool guy when you get to know him.”
“Come drink lemonade with me,” she offers, and holds the ladder to help him descend. At the bottom rung, they kiss. She thinks his arcane symbols show real craftsmanship. The longer she knows him, the more secret talents he reveals.
In the living room, they drink organic lemonade with pulp. Their packed belongings take up most of the dining room and parlor. Careful to cover all her bases, Leigh plans on telling Sequoia’s parents they’ve gone missing after she finishes burning the black people. Then she and Jason will say goodbye to California with a road trip up Route 1.
“Maybe we should do some sort of ceremony,” he muses. “For their spirits.”
“You’re so sweet.” She tickles him under his beard. “I have a better idea. Let’s just kill them.”
They are sucking tongue when glass breaks upstairs. Cold with terror, she tries grabbing Jason’s arm but he pulls away, follows the noise while she follows him. “There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation and don’t get mad but fucking stop him! Grab him!”
No sooner does she throw open her door than she glimpses Jason struggling with the boy, who has smashed one of her windows, his escape attempt barely thwarted. From the hole she flicks her gaze to the trash-strewn floor and the rope around the desk leg Brenden chewed through. Jason has the boy in his arm, a hand over his mouth even as he screams from Brenden’s furious teeth. Her stomach turns in revulsion at the boy’s pinched, triangular face; his clothing soiled; crescents of blood under his nails. Over Jason’s hand, his dark-circled eyes bulge at the sight of her.
“Good work,” she tells Jason. “Now—”
“Why,” Jason asks in a trembling voice, “is this kid in your room?”
“Your aggression is really scaring me right now—”
“WHY IS HE HERE?”
“He’s a hostage, duh. In case we needed one. It was a really, really smart idea.”
Brenden’s struggles force Jason to a knee. Jason says, “Have you been starving him?”
“Look. Whatever you’re feeling right now, Jason, the fact is we can’t uncross this Rubicon. He knows our names and faces. You have to kill him.”
Brenden’s muffled screams turn pleading. Hurriedly she searches her arts and crafts drawer. “This’ll do,” she forces scissors into Jason’s free hand. To Brenden, “Sorry, little buddy.”
Rather than witness the act, she races downstairs. Her plan was to kill Brenden herself and leave Jason none the wiser. Whatever. It’s handled.
Deep breathing serves to calm her. Among the trash bags set aside for donations she is surprised to glimpse a blanket she recognizes at the top of the linen bag, a brown fleece with gold stitching. Memories flood her cortex of a squat on San Pablo, that freezing night on the living room floor when her toes went blue. Consequently, looking for extra linens, she found this blanket in the free box. She lifts it from the bag and presses it to her cheek, appreciating its scratchiness. Like me, she told herself: frayed yet beautiful. Perhaps, instead of Goodwill, she will leave it on the roadside for another rootless queer to find. Start the saga anew.
No sign of Jason. She ventures to the foyer. “Sweetums? Honey bun? Sweetie bear?”
A creak. A pair of bloody scissors. She waits to greet her boyfriend with a smile.
Wheezing in exhaustion, Brenden stands over her, covered head to toe in blood. His voice is a high, passionless croak. “Miss Leigh.”
Impossible, she thinks. What kind of pussy gets taken out by a seven-year-old?
“Monster!” She throws the blanket at it and runs into the parlor. She trips over furniture and trash bags, pursued by the demon imp at her heels. She throws a lamp. She pushes a bookshelf down. Still it comes. Racing through the kitchen she tries to dial 9-1-1, but in her haste the phone goes flying from her hands. From the kitchen she climbs through the window and into the hall, the apish thing in pursuit.
There lies the keyring on the bottom ladder rung. Salvation like a dove after the storm.
Leigh almost crashes to the floor grabbing it, but she does. She finds a key, finds a door, opens the lock and slips inside. Holds the knob and leans back with all her weight, as the ape stabs maniacally at the wood.
“You fatherless bastard!” she yells. “I can swing on a knob, too, and I’m better at it than you! You’ll never get in. You’re shit. You’re dumb shit who no one will ever care about. You’re nothing but a fucking monkey. I’m a human being.”
Silence from the demon. Leigh feels him release his grip. In case he intends to trick her, she continues holding the door shut.
Below the knob, a shudder. A click. Terror lays icy fingers on her throat. She turns the knob. Nothing happens.
Locked.
SIXTEENTH STORY
Locked in the dark.
Leigh can hear her own ragged breath. “Honey,” she stammers. “Miss Leigh didn’t mean those things. Let me out. Let’s talk. Honey?”
When she hears him step away from the door, she realizes his intentions. She begs for release. With all her strength she kicks the unyielding door, rams her shoulders against it. All is pitch-black—chilling, considering the halls stay perpetually lit. Rotten smells start to creep in. Cautiously she stretches her arms to either side, to feel for walls. Nothing.
For a long moment she sits with her ear to the wood, listening to Brenden step across the hallway. He turns a key, enters, and shuts.
“Stay together, Leigh,” she tells herself. “Jason’s dead. Alvin will come. Worst comes to worst, just go out the other end of the hall. Yeah. Let’s go to Austin. Or Chicago. Just keep cool.”
Still, to think of stumbling blind through that blackness rattles her. So she clings to the door like a neanderthal in her cave afraid of the raging storm.
Indeterminable time passes before she hears the Garfield door open again. Footsteps—she counts six bodies entering the hall. At the memory of Mica’s sadistic plan, she holds her breath to keep silent, should his savages have come to finish the job they started with Sequoia. Their footsteps gather outside her door, perhaps her chance. No one can sweet-talk like her, and, worst case scenario, she can outrun these blundering black people. But, instead of opening the door, the six people move to the end of the hall and exit through the aperture.
Leigh sleeps.
Startled awake at the squeal of the window opening, she throws her ear to the door. One, two, three, four footsteps. “Jason?” she hears Alvin say. “You can’t answer texts anymore, bro?”
She fills her lungs to scream his name when a clatter, as of four doors opening at once, breaks the still. Shock and anger boom in Alvin’s voice.
“Who the fuck are you guy—” His words end on a zap! Something heavy hits the floor. In moments the hallway fills with a sound like meat spitting over a fire.
Leigh flees into the dark.
Stinging ears in her eyes, pleas on her lips, she stumbles through nothingness for seeming miles. At last she stops to catch her breath, the air she gulps fetid and nauseating. Increasingly panicked, she shouts, “Hello? Can anybody help me?”
Not even an echo responds from the dark, and Leigh, having no sense of direction in such a place, has to forge ahead. Further in, the necrotic smell reaches gut-wrenching levels of stink. However, that rot proves her ally, because it signals exactly which hall she’s been trapped in. “I thought the fertilizer buried the smell,” she laughs hesitantly, venturing further toward Cincinnati. “How’s it going, Andre? You still dead?”
Her eyes have adjusted enough to take stock of her surroundings. Before her stretches a vast ebon plain beneath a starless sky. Treeless, the earth undulates in hills and deep valleys, the soil spongy beneath her feet. Eventually she slips on the unsteady terrain, and when she catches her fall finds the land slimy, fibrous to the touch. Her stomach turns to realize she walks not on dirt and stone, but miles of rotting flesh.
“Is anybody there! Answer me! I demand to speak with whoever’s in charge!”
Her words vanish, as if she exists in a bowl painted back. Curled up on her side, she screams, “Mommy! I’m having a bad dream and I can’t wake up. Mommy please help me!”
On she ploughs over decomposing terrain. At what feels like sunrise, she comes to a forest where trees composed of yellowed bone jut at strange angles from the soil. Like any arboreals they grow branches, at the ends of which glazed eyeballs the size of her head hang from stems. In the distance she glimpses vast objects of inconsistent shape—some slender, some round, some cloud-like. She makes for them.
Further on hunger strikes. Thirst comes soon after. As if in answer to her wish, she espies at the bottom of a long and steep hill a stream; turgid, clotted with a pudding-like substance. Heedless, she rolls down the escarpment until she comes to a painful halt at the bottom. Crawls to the water that shows no reflection of herself. She drinks handfuls of rotten blood.
Bleached yellow, rust red, fog gray, and abyssal black are the colors in this place. Nothing makes a sound. At the next bone forest, Leigh, at last succumbed to hunger’s indignities, plucks an eyeball from the stalk and bites into it. Never in her life has she tasted anything worse than rotting meat, but, being meat, it sustains her. Here she rests a moment with her back against the splintery tree trunk. She hates black people for reducing her to this state.
More miles and she reaches the first of the structures she viewed from a distance. It is a rotted arm some twenty stories tall. Further in she finds a pair of colossal, desiccated legs with the feet thrust skyward. A limbless gray torso. A heap of withered intestines. A pair of airless lungs like two great, deflated mountains. A cock.
Around these structures grow palm trees made of serrated flesh, blood dripping like sap from their fronds, intestines that reek of undigested food squeezed within their hollowed boles. Deeper in the forest, she discovers dead-flesh cacti, from whose leaves copies of Andre’s lifeless head hang upside-down from sheer flaps of neck flesh. Bone baobab trees provide no shade from canopies made from skeletal fingers, even if shade were her concern. Here the weather is chill, not cold, a promise of rain that never comes. To warm herself, she claws at the fleshy earth, digging up blood that oozes, and buries herself in the rot.
Soon this will end, Leigh tells herself. Chen will learn about his grandson and rescue her.
In time she encounters people, a dozen in total. Joyfully she runs to them. They stand over eight feet tall, headless, un-genitaled, their legs squat, their ungainly simian arms hanging past their knees. In their broad, fleshy chests are faces of people, most of them black. Dead faces, they slur gibberish from barely mobile lips. They are people Andre knew, she realizes. Representations of memory somehow carried to his bloodstream despite her pulverizing his brain. They are friends of his. They are the children he will never have.
Approaching one with its back turned to her, her attempt to speak leaves her choking on the dryness in her throat. It turns at the sound of her grunt, and she gasps to stare full upon a face that is clearly her own, and, she realizes in revulsion, how the dead man must have viewed her.
Andre, her lover, saw an imbecilic, narcotized thug.
So she moves over cadaverous simulacrum of mountain, escarpment, desert, and jungle. She learns to eat rotting organs and drink dried blood. Beset by indigestion and diarrhea, every minute brings a new agony to her body. This is Hell, and she hates Andre for this. But she will never lose hope.
Distantly there appears to her a new person. On trembling knees, she hobbles to them, reaches to embrace them. Her hands collide with something hard, and the sensation hurts worse than anything. Bruises open on her sensitive palms.
Before her rises upon an upright rectangular plane, the surface of which constitutes a grime-ridden mirror, the first she has seen in this world. But this cannot be her reflection, she thinks. The woman before her looks skeletal, a hag perversely clothed in the tatters of some dress a vain girl might wear. Sores bloom like dandelions across skin turned white from malnutrition. Her hair has fallen out. Her feet, ankles, and belly are swollen. Scabs climb the lengths of her twig-like legs, and from her boney fingers nails like talons. Within the hideous face, two eyes stare in grief and madness at Leigh, who can only laugh.
“That’s the best you got?” she says, though it pains her to speak. “You gotta try harder’n that, baby. Princess Leigh’s a survivor!” For a time she coughs on her hands and knees. Through tears she says, “I’m strong. Your lies can’t trick me.”
Because she’s a badass bitch, and everyone loves a bad bitch. Everywhere she sees them: her parents and her sister, April; radical queers; an army of lovers; Dr. Alison and Dr. Kenya; Chen and Alvin; Jason, Sequoia, Jo, Stephen, Reggie, and Mica. Adoring applause.
And Andre, she thinks fondly, taking his hand to separate him from the crowd. You loved me more than anyone you beautiful black man. they can’t fool me cause i know who i am. do you know how to waltz. let me show you. one to three one two three dance with me andre. has anyone ever been so loved i don’t think so cause its me andre ha ha you understand i am young i am beautiful i know who i am i am leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh me leigh i win i win i win