Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

IO
her with broken locks on pill cabinets and a vanished hospital bed.
I tell them to trust no one.
Slander
I leave town for three days, and when I come back there are
two bottles of MJ's insulin in the refrigerator. Johnson comes in
from his afternoon jog. "Yeah," he says. "MJ's been staying here
the last couple nights." He raises his eyebrows. You bastard, I say
to him, though I can't keep the perverse smile off my face.
Johnson spreads himself face down on our couch. "You would not
believe the shit I've learned about her, Parker," he says into the
cushions. He rolls over. His eyes hold an expression of exhausted
wonder. "She likes to be tied up, man." Yeah, sure. "I'm not
kidding. And get this: she likes doing it outside, too. We had this
totally weird conversation at dinner last night." It's bullshit, I tell
him. She's just trying to get a rise out of him. She likes to tell
stories to do that. Johnson sits up and wipes the sweat off his face
with his shirt. "Man, I have confirmed the tied up part."
When MJ arrives later, I excuse myself and go to my room to
do my work. All night, whenever I need to go to the kitchen or
bathroom, I tiptoe down the hall past Johnson's room. Most of the
noise I know is in my head, and if I concentrate, if I'm quiet
enough, I won't be able to hear a thing.
Voyeurism
I walk into my bedroom one night and before I turn on the
lights I see a naked woman in a window across the street. It is
eleven o'clock, and I figure she's getting ready for bed. She walks
back and forth in front of the window for several minutes, her
breasts and bare shoulders perfectly visible. She has a fan running
in the window and I realize she must think that because she
cannot see through it from her side, no one can see through it
from the other side either. I focus on my own window, trying to
figure out why it would work the way it does and not the way she
expects, and by the time I think to look up again, she's turned out
the lights. For the next few nights at eleven o'clock, as Johnson
and MJ settle in next to each other on the couch to watch a movie
on TV, I retire to my room and watch the woman across the street.
One evening I watch her playwith a ferret, nuzzling its long, furry
body between her breasts, lifting it up to her face to talk to it. I
believe I have seen everything. A few nights later I see her and
another woman hold each other for several minutes before the
lights go out. I think for a moment I will tell Johnson about this,
but then I remember his claims about MJ, and I decide to keep this
to myself. One night when MJ and Johnson are over at her place,
a storm blows up. At eleven o'clock the woman across the street
is not home. Her window is dark. There is lightning, and for a
moment I see my own reflection in my window: short, dark,
slightly overweight. Johnson is tall and athletic and looks good
standing next to MJ. The thunder rolls and the disk duplicator
chatters in the dark behind me.
Vandalism
Two blocks away they're tearing down a row of houses. MJ
and I watched them rip away chunks of building with a huge, steel
claw on the end of a digging machine. Walls tore and bricks
crumbled, all of it sounding like a billion strands of dried spaghetti
breaking. They sprayed down the piles of debris with a fire hose.
They left two small brick houses standing, one of them with a
dozen leaded-glass windows. Salvageable. MJ thinks she can make
end tables out of them. Several times during our walk she stops
and models with her arms the complex arrangement of mannequin
pieces she'll need for the table legs.
At two in the morning I climb over the orange plastic fence
surrounding the demolition and jog across the mud and shattered
bricks to the shadows between the remaining houses. One window
is ajar, and with just a little prying with a crowbar, the wood frame
creaks away. I catch the heavy glass pane in one hand, somehow
balance it as I dodge the falling wood, and set the window in the
mud. I catch my breath, listen for cars. I put the window outside
the orange fence, lean it against a trash can, then head back for
another.
None of the other windows will swing open. I see then that
one corner of the house has already been knocked once with the