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Sometimes in your secret dreams you carve a hole inside yourself and
wait for someone to come along and fill it. And some do come along
who almost fit, but not quite. Others come to you as fog who try to
fill and fit everything. I explained this once to my shrink. When he
moved to Manhattan, I stopped trying to explain anything.
Forget that hole inside. Life is too short. "Make no entangling alliances,"
was my father's motto, and he was right. But wrong about me not being
able to make a living as a writer. Still, a man has certain needs.
I forget about the dreams, plug the hole with one hooker after another,
strung out from here to Jupiter and back again. A crash for cash.
Some last long enough to turn me on. One or two enjoy it. I forget
their faces more quickly than their names.
The skinny one with the knapsack catches my eye. She waves to me,
so I pull over, let the window down far enough to hear her price,
but she won't say. Gives me some story about her car I don't need
to know. Wants me to take her to the Greyhound Station. Sure, right.
But I go along with it, tell her I'll be glad to do this tomorrow
morning, but that I'm going home and would she like to have a good
night's sleep or is she in too much of a hurry. I can't believe she
doesn't seem to catch the sarcasm.
In my apartment, she stops to look at the bookshelf. Squats, pulls
one volume out and reads a phrase aloud. She asks me questions about
the author. "It's a pen name," I tell her. Probably say more than
I mean to.
I offer her a drink but she says she'd rather have coffee, if that's
okay. So I find myself in my kitchen instead of my bedroom. She finds
some crackers and a jar of peanut butter, keeping up a steady stream
of conversation while she eats, the kind of conversation you could
have with anyone if you knew them well enough. Somewhere along in
there, between the smiles and silly jokes, I begin to realize that
she's for real.
The evening becomes a passage. Somehow none of it surprises me. Like
when we wind up listening to Cusco's latest CD, or when I find myself
telling her things I never told that effing shrink. I watch in her
eyes and listen to her voice. I notice the way she holds her coffee
mug close to her mouth and how when she takes a sip her upper teeth
show.
So midnight comes and goes. It might have lasted longer, that night.
I don't know, never will. I decide I won't be taking her to the bus
station. She's just too close. She should be fog.
I pretend that she has a book I wrote in her knapsack. Not my usual,
something different. She falls asleep on the couch and I cover her
with a blanket before I turn in.
When morning comes I put her in a cab, and like a dude cowboy slap
the trunk as it takes off. So she leaves quietly with her knapsack
and her straggly blonde hair, which I noticed was dark at the roots.
I try to forget her eyes, a silvery blue with indigo coronas. I try
to forget the light from those eyes. But she has my phone number and my
address in her pocket.
Two weeks late she writes she's got a job waiting tables in a cafe
somewhere in Kansas. Calls me sometimes on Sundays, says how the
food is rewardingly greasy and makes jokes about the people she meets. She
seems happy, and this is good. Says she's almost saved enough for a
PC.
I finish my next novel: Sex Slaves of the Orient. Another sure thing
I can bet on, pay debts with, play with, carry on my lifestyle with,
take to my grave.
Think I'll send her a check so she can get the damned computer early.
Maybe she'll make it on her own. She's safe there, far away from me.
She didn't have my book in her knapsack. She had a manuscript. It
wasn't bad, but it wasn't porn or anything else you could sell.
Tonight I walk home alone, pleased with the way the moon
complements
my shadow, makes me tall.
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