“Do you want me, too?”
“Yes. And no.”
He leans back, flashes a smile that makes me wish we hadn’t met here, in this place where my mental health is a question mark.
“I’ll take that. For now.”
Inside I shiver because
For a moment he watches me and I feel naked. Usually it’s just my mind feeling exposed here, but now it’s my body as well. My nipples tighten. I swallow hard.
“Did you have the dream?” he asks.
“What?”
He never goes first. Never prompts me. But here he is changing all the rules. The notebook is back on his lap and he’s sitting there, pen idle in his right hand. That much, at least, is normal.
“The jar.”
“Oh. That.” The jar, the jar, the stinking jar. The tumor in my life. The jar is like having cancer and trying to figure out where you went wrong so its growth was nurtured. Was it the butter? The margarine? Too much beef? Too much watching and waiting on the microwave to ding? What had I done that someone felt compelled to enter my home and give me an antediluvian mystery? I pick through the bones of my life looking for clues and find nothing.
“Yes,” I say.
He waits.
“It’s the color of scorched cream.” My hands reach into thin air and grasp invisible handles. And stop. They sink to my knees, massage the patella. “We do this every week and nothing changes.”
“Did you look at the bottom?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Wherever it’s from, it’s not made in China. That I know of.”
We share a tense smile.
“What do you think is inside?” he asks.
“I couldn’t guess. Most likely nothing.”
“Have you wondered?”
“No,” I lie.
“But something has changed: this week you looked at the bottom. Next time I want you to see if you can look inside. How do you feel about that?”
My hands ball into fists. “Fine.”
Dawn comes in the same gray cloak she always wears these days. Shades of blue would be more becoming, or maybe pearls and pinks and peaches, because somewhere out there it’s spring—or should be. My eyelids fly open to the welcome feeling of no nausea and the less welcome feeling of a two-by-four beating against the inside of my skull in some kind of erratic Morse code. Pressing my hands against my stomach, I perform a half crunch and my muscles tense in protest. Concave, although slightly closer to flat than before.
“Amino acids.”
“What?”
My captor is crouched on the floor, fastening wires to a cigarette-pack-sized block of sweating plasticine.
“You still want to save your friend?”
“Yes,” I rasp.
“Be my guest.” He doesn’t look up.
“What about amino acids?”
“They are the building blocks of life. Combined in the right order, they make proteins. DNA is made of amino acids. Probably they will kill her and eat her. Human flesh has the amino acids they need.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Are you menstruating?”
“What?”
“You’re angry. Women are often angry when they menstruate. It is the hormones.”
I rub my head until the tapping subsides to a tick.
“Where do you come from?”
“Switzerland.”
“Do they teach manners there?”
He keeps working with his blocks. “They don’t teach anything there now. My country is gone. And my people.” Hard planes maketh this man. He is the Alps of his homeland in miniature: hard, unyielding, cruel.
I pick up my body, then I pick up my backpack. And I leave.
I am going to rescue Lisa. If I don’t, there’s no hope for the child growing inside me. I need to be able to save someone.
Purple paper does not flatter Stiffy, but that’s what Ben wants.
“The bright color will make people look,” he says.
Who am I to argue? I’ve got a soft spot for that hunk of orange fur with the
“Put them everywhere. Cover other people’s lost pets if you have to.” He takes off, shoving fliers at all available warm bodies. Purple paper floats to the ground, but Ben doesn’t notice that people think he’s just another loon with something to shill.
The opposite direction is mine. I’m more conservative as I tape Stiffy’s face to walls and poles. I smile at a few people, but they glance away, focused on their own troubles. At the end of the block I turn back. That’s what we agreed to. Ben and I meet in the middle outside our apartment building.
His top lip twitches beneath his crusty nose. When I ask how he is, he shrugs.
“Just a cold,” he says. “And I think maybe I’m pregnant, because I’m always riding the porcelain bus, or thinking about it.” He sounds like honking geese when he laughs. “I’m happy now, though, because someone’s going to find Stiffy. He’ll be back by tonight, I know it.”
He’s wrong. The fliers yield nothing more than a handful of obscene calls and one guy with a Korean accent inquiring about a job. Stiffy shows up a week later, gaunt and matted and filthy from some adventure that only makes sense to him. He saunters through my window with his usual nonchalance and takes the front-row seat in front of the jar.
Something cold and scaly uncoils in my gut.
“Stiffy.”
Usually he’ll glance up at me, rub my shins, make noises about food. But this time he employs selective hearing and ignores me. When I approach him, he spits, lashes out, nothing like the cat I know. I shut the window and call Ben. The phone rings in stereo, through the floor and in my ear. Nine rings. I dial again. Three more and he picks up.
“Hold on.” His throat forces out noises that sound like he’s coughing up a hairball. “I can’t stop puking,” he says, but he makes an effort when I tell him I have his cat.
A minute later he’s busting through my door, his skin waxen, his breath acidic and foul.
“Stiffy!” He rushes to hug his cat.
Ben leaves with a spring to his step. The last image I see of Stiffy is the marmalade cat wide-eyed and unblinking, staring at the jar over his owner’s shoulder.
