San Diego Noir

They sold them at The Black, a souvenir and head shop that was ten years older than she was, that had been around for forty years. The stickers were round, yellow and olive green, with a silhouette of a tall, hunched man carrying a knapsack. It made Kari think of the Boy Scouts.

It wasn’t that she liked the bums. The homeless crowd that had moved into Ocean Beach recently wasn’t like the old hippies who lived in their beat-up vans and had been around forever. These bums, they were younger, mostly, single guys, and some of them were a little scary. A lot of them were meth-heads, or so the local gossip went, and she believed that was true; with their greasy hair, the blemishes on their skin, the way their faces had hollowed out and their eyes seemed to have come loose from the sockets, rattling around like marbles in a shot glass.

But she didn’t like the stickers.

“I don’t know, I think it’s mean,” she said.

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re just way too nice.”

They sat in the small gray patio of South Beach Bar and Grille. It was Taco Tuesday, and the tacos were all $2.50. Sam loved the mahi tacos, claimed they were the best fish tacos he’d ever had.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It makes it sound like they’re animals or something.”

“If they were animals, you’d be feeding them,” he pointed out.

She blushed a little. “I like feeding the cats. They don’t hurt anything.”

“It’s cool that you feed them,” Sam said, taking a bite of his taco.

She did like feeding the cats. The routine gave her focus, and a kind of satisfaction.

It was funny, because Before, she didn’t even want to have pets.

There was a Before and an After, and she knew that she was two different people. Except that the After just felt like Now. Everything always happened all at once; she had a hard time putting one moment before another, one moment after the next.

She knew as well that she wasn’t able to think the way she used to. Knew this mostly because people who knew her Before would let that slip sometimes. But every now and then, she’d know it herself. She’d start to think of something, something quicksilver and elusive, and she could almost catch it, but it would flash between her fingers, gone, leaving just its emptiness behind.

Maybe I’ll be able to someday, she’d think, but she didn’t like to think too much about that. Sometimes, if she tried too hard to grab onto such thoughts, she’d get so frustrated, the anger bubbling up in her like a teapot boiling on the stove. She’d break things, sometimes, when she felt like that.

But that didn’t happen much. It hadn’t happened in a while.

She always set a timer when she boiled water too. So she wouldn’t forget.

That was the key to managing her After life. They’d taught her all these things in rehab. Make lists. Check off your to-do’s. Stick to a routine.

“So you want to go, you know?” Sam asked. He stretched out his arm and settled his hand on hers, his thumb gently rubbing the muscle between her thumb and forefinger. Kari liked it when he did that. Her right hand cramped sometimes, at odd moments, since the accident.

She got out her notebook. Looked at her list for the day. “I can’t,” she said. “David’s home tonight.”

Sam tilted back his head and sighed. “Okay.”

Sam didn’t like David. Which made sense, she guessed. They were about as different as two people could be. Sam was relaxed. Shaggy. That was the word that she used for him. He smoked a lot of pot and liked to surf. He made money doing carpentry and odd jobs, and he wrote things, stories and poems. She didn’t know if what he wrote was any good or not. That was one of the problems she had After. Reading, keeping the words in order, was hard for her; they were like unruly kids who wouldn’t stay in line.

But she didn’t really care if Sam was a good writer. She liked him. He was nice, she thought, and she liked the way he smelled, and she liked how he fucked her.

Made love, she corrected herself. That was how you were supposed to think of it.

She liked how David made love too, but he was really different. He was bright. Sharp. Those were her words for him. She liked to look at him, just to take in his glow. He probably wouldn’t like Sam, if he ever met him. David didn’t have a lot of patience. He lost patience with her sometimes, though he tried hard not to.

But David was from Before. She’d had to tell Sam about David, but she couldn’t see any reason to tell David about Sam.

David was from Before, so he came first. She could keep that much in order.

She knew that sleeping with two different men at the same time wasn’t something she was supposed to be doing. Helen, her therapist, talked to her a lot about that. “You have some problems with impulse control,” Helen said. Kari remembered this because Helen had said it many times, and she’d written it down.

“When you want to sleep with somebody, you really need to stop and ask yourself why. And if this is something you’ll be happy about the next day.”

Kari had actually thought this was pretty stupid advice, but she’d kept that to herself. “Why” was because it could be fun and it might feel good. How she’d feel about it the next day was impossible to predict—it hadn’t happened yet.

Still, she remembered that she had to be careful about things, about getting pregnant, about getting diseases. They’d wanted to give her some kind of shot or some other thing, some device, for birth control, so she wouldn’t have to remember to do anything, but she convinced them that she could remember to take the pill, and she could remember to use condoms, and she did.

Write it down. Stick to a routine.