The Quiet Parts Pt. 17
THIRTEENTH STORY
At night they swarm her. Squat and brutish, they burst from the floor, wave upon wave of naked blacks. They climb upon her in bed and bite her breasts, eating her alive.
She wakes with a gasp. Drenched in sweat, she takes a moment to collect herself. “Just a dream,” she says, then looks into the dark where the boy is a pair of naked, haunted eyes.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry. Miss Leigh was just having a nightmare. Did you know, when I was in elementary school they called me Hippie Leigh? That’s because I was always trying to break up fights. I was all about peace. It’s so weird looking back on it,” she says, smiling at her idealistic child self, “because the older I get, the more I know that’s exactly what I want. I went to Summer looking for war. But all I ever wanted was a nice, quiet, peaceful life. I deserve that, right?”
“I’m hungry.” His voice sounds weak, pained.
The clock on her nightstand reads 5:14 AM. She rolls out of bed to find a granola bar among the trash on the floor. It has been a long time since she’s cleaned. Keeping the lights off, she tosses the bar toward his stark, black silhouette and watches him gobble it so fast he nearly eats the paper. She is repulsed at his savagery, embarrassed at herself for being so entranced.
“In the Garfield hall here’s a place called Summer.” Haunted still by the blacks from her nightmare, she seeks more than ever the balm this boy gives her simply by listening. “It’s nothing but black people living in harmony away from us nasty, nasty white folks. But that was all propaganda. They’re war-like. They tricked me.”
Brenden, finished with his granola bar, folds the wrapper into a neat square that unfolds the moment he lays it down.
“Need to go to the bathroom,” he moans.
“What was that look you just gave me?” she snaps at his sudden, unwarranted aggression. “What was that look, you belligerent boy?”
“I wasn’t looking at y—”
She slaps him. Brenden curls up on the floor, weeping.
“Oh, knock it off,” she sighs, returning to bed. “I told you shit in the bucket.” She can only wish for peaceful dreams as she burrows beneath the covers. “Soon this will be over.”
Late summer, the world hellishly humid like the intestines of a blue whale, Leigh opens OkCupid for the first time in months and swims through the vomit of her inbox. She contacts gentrifiers. These men—egotistical white bros and Asian nerds trained for tech since birth—see her clearly stressed, at which point she becomes another algorithm to them. They suggest pills, massage, spas, therapy, and sound baths. They do everything but whisk her to a better life.
Intercourse with them takes her to worlds more fantastic than Summer: workspaces where the cubicles are tempered glass scrawled in five-year plans; cabins in the woods; Patrick Bateman condominiums; startups where adults engage in Nerf fights; in a warehouse in the Lower Bottoms, she gets fucked on the lumpy hood of an art car.
One morning she wakes in an expensive-looking room. Quietly, as to not wake the snoring man, she pads barefoot to the balcony overlooking Nob Hill. Panoramic before her, the Masonic Temple and Grace Cathedral halve the sky into a blue door through which she strains to view the Pacific.
You ain’t special. Words Andre spoke with such certainty they cling to her brain, as if they are his dying curse spat at the moment she took his life, instead of a thoughtless insult made moments before.
“You think I’m not self-aware,” she tells his ghost. “If I’m so boring, well, I live in a special place and I do special things. If I’m not special, the illusion will suffice. So fuck you.”
Then, one day, she finds herself in the home where she pays rent. On her knees, she is licking the last scraps of leaf from a baggie of pot when Jason comes in wearing a stylish leather jacket, tanned from Oregon. He removes his shades and says, “You look like shit.”
Like he is her priest, she confesses everything, minus her role in Sequoia’s death, minus child abduction, her confession rife with apology. Seated on the couch, he listens to her as a blush of anger purples out from his cheeks to cover every inch of face, and though she expects such a reaction, she does not expect his first words to be, “Why’d you kill Andre? He was cool.”
“Weren’t you listening? He tried to rape me.”
“Yeah, well. He could’ve helped us handle this.”
“We can handle it ourselves,” she argues, “because we’re smart. I refuse to feel bad.”
“You should feel bad. You fucked us.”
“And sitting there shaming me is not going to un-fuck us.”
“I’ll un-fuck us,” she says, full of surety.
“How?” she asks, hopeful he has a plan.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” he smirks. “I’ll contact Chen and tell him you messed up. Then we’re gonna catch a show at Gilman. You got any drugs?”
“There’s a little coke in the downstairs medicine cabinet,” she admits.
At the coffee table he chops a line. Inhales. A long moment passes while he endures the drip.
“You can have the rest,” he offers, rubbing at his nose. “I’m done being an outlaw. I was a month away from having adverse possession of that squat on MacArthur,” he reminds her. “I’ve got land lined up in Oregon and nothing is fucking this up. Not you, not Chen, not even two worlds full of niggers. What’s Chen gonna do to us? My dad’s a law—”
She hushes him with a kiss. It pleases her to discover he’s showered. Elated, relieved, and manic she unzips his jeans. Jason’s dick is like Jason himself: average at first glance, the confidence of the thing is what makes it attractive. A real man made of hair, teeth, and greed he ravishes her on the carpet. After he comes, his body turns to deadweight on top of her.
“Fuck yeah,” he dribbles postcoital nothings. “I think . . . I think . . .”
She puts a finger to his lips. “No. This is the quiet part.”