Duplicity

         I bite my nails frequently. I think I always have done so, but I can’t be sure of the accuracy of my memory; whether my cuticles were once flawless and unmarred or ravaged and jagged with violent peaks of lingering flesh not torn away by my solid, tombstone-shaped teeth is a fact long since lost to deeper recesses of my mind, gradually becoming corrupted with passing suggestions or amalgamations that change a person’s name or the color of a house before vanishing altogether.

         I bite my nails now, in Jason’s Deli, while I wait for the prophecy of my glorious order to come to fruition, the order of course being an Amy’s Turkey-O sandwich sans tomato and onion, a “water”(really a cup of stolen soda pop beverage because I live life on the edge) and a bag of Baked! Potato chips(because I’m trying to watch my figure). Around me, the familiar hodgepodge of typical Jason’s Deli patrons coalesce and split around me in the orange light of the late afternoon; young twenty-somethings with no kids out for a casual meal before adjourning to their shared bedroom to have predictable missionary sex followed by brand new Conan on TBS; older, more financially stable couples eating their meal in silence, the man’s gaze fixed upon the Vizio flat screen television in the corner displaying either CNN or Sportscenter while the women stare longingly at the twenty-somethings still consumed in themselves, they will not have sex tonight; groups of sweaty, dirty children freshly triumphant from the neighborhood soccer practice, poor chaperon parent in tow exasperatedly attempting to negotiate the orders of a baker’s dozen of preteens before they make quite the disastrous mess of a booth, the carnage being so terrible that the Hispanic janitor, Renaldo, lets loose gasps here and there as more debris is unearthed; a plastic, Stepford mother bearing a disappointed grimace with her emo/scene daughter who absolutely despises her mother, apparently having only removed her purple mascara and skin-tight fishnet stockings to journey to Jason’s Deli, criss-crossing red lines covering the not inconsiderable expanse between her upper thigh and ankles, making a kind of sexy checkerboard pattern on her porcelain legs which she clearly notices me noticing. I raise both eyebrows at her and she shrugs like “What can you do?”, completely misreading Sexy Maneuver #11: The Casual Double-Eyebrow Raise. Or she knew perfectly well what it was and she simply wasn’t interested in Poppa Bear’s honey, sweet as it may be.

         My scarlet padded booth is situated farthest from the flat screen, which was fine by me because I don’t happen to give a fuck about TCU and I give even less of a fuck about how their ridiculous mauve macho machines mounted many menagerie’s-worth of other mongrel man-children. I bite my nails some more as I try to casually survey the other areas of the restaurant. She left the table and I’m waiting on my food to return, I think. I typically bite my nails when I’m alone. Especially when I’m nervous. Now, I’m both.

         “47?”

         Startled, I look to find the thick black woman bearing my sandwich, in all it’s resplendent avocado prestige, and her salad, which wasn’t so much a salad as it was a small mound of miscellaneous lettuce, fruits and vegetables, raspberry vinaigrette on the side. I nod and pass the plastic red marker to the Whoopi Goldberg stunt double currently serving our lunch. She grumbled something about “crackers” which I didn’t quite catch and the moment she departed fully from paying me any attention, I immediately resumed biting my nails.

It had been about a half an hour since she was released from her stay in the hospital, spending very little total time under observation, the staff having become enchanted by her curiously alluring wiles, even go so far as to allow her to smoke cigarettes in her room as long as she closed the door. But she eventually grew tired of all the lime Jell-O she could eat and all the free Charter Digital Cable she could watch and so, when the marathons of old episodes of Dexter’s Laboratory on Boomerang were over, she returned to her unconsciously favorite past time of being the source of my misery.

         And there she is, almost on cue, slow-motion walking towards me for the umpteenth time, flipping her hair mid-walk and winking and blowing kisses to the guys that she isn’t walking to. It’s quite a production and I make a mental note to continue to buy my drugs from Lil C, my current favorite connection who I know absolutely nothing about and who knows nothing about me and who gives me bomb ass sacks of whatever I ask for, because apparently his products are working quite well(considering she actually walked quickly back to the booth without sparing a glance at any other living soul other than myself). Today she oozes sexuality from beneath a faded TCU shirt, colored eclectically with the occasional smattering of different paints, reminiscent of the time she redecorated her apartment before making love on the floor in the midst of her aesthetic triumph with someone who was most definitely not me, but whose shirt she was currently wearing. A subtle declaration of something rebellious at my expense, I’m sure. She also wore the traditional pink Nike shorts, barely reaching her thighs, favored the nation over by the preppy, attractive young women whom all possess relatively the same bodily proportions of being hot, but hot in such a way where it almost isn’t; the type of hot that is aesthetically pleasing to a point but hardly irreplaceable as, in all likelihood, the girls around any given hottie probably have at least four if not more physical similarities, making them impressive but only in the sense that McMansions are impressive (I mean, shit, you can find them all over the place, it’s not really hunting if I can hit one with a randomly thrown rock on campus). But I suppose if asked, she would say “I wore the Nike shorts ironically”, being the tiny little smart-ass that she is and also, “What do you know? You’re colorblind.” True. I also don’t really care what women wear.

         Ironic or not, she still took my breath away no matter how well ventilated I happened to be at the moment I would lay eyes on her. Always the same, my lungs fluttered and filled with air, cold like the first breath outside your house in November circa 2002, before my heart somersaults over the condors flapping about in my stomach. I always feel like such a fucking mess around her that it’s bordering humiliating. I’m sure no one even notices it, I tell myself, just like in sex education when they told the boys that if we got erections in class everything was ok because certainly no one could possibly perceive them. However, over time that was no longer true and I feared the same of my hypothesis concerning my behavior around her.

         Wordlessly, she sits back down, well, perches really, with her knees in front of her chest and feet on the booth, casually chipping away at the mound of unruly lettuce and walnuts and grapes. I never really understood adding grapes to a salad because I, personally, do not think that grape + lettuce = foodgasm. Sounds like just a lot of wetness in my mouth. And wetness or moistness is good, I suppose although moist is a disgusting word, but there’s a certain level(I posit somewhere around a grape to lettuce ratio of 2:1) of wetness I’m not prepared to handle having in my mouth, lest I drool inappropriately or accidentally drown myself when I mean to breathe. Apparently, I’m afraid of a lot of things. Chief among them, spiders and drowning from consuming too many grapes.

         Dangling harmlessly on her bony wrist was a white wristband pulled very tight and fastened so that there was a lot of plastic band jutting out. Her name and date of birth printed in the standard miniature block letters hospitals and the army favor. Every so often, she paused from tackling her salad to scratch absent-mindedly at her wrist while she observed my face. If she was curious about something, she always stared at me to wear down my resolve to keep a secret from her. I had anticipated this and loaded my blood with Xanax and hydrocodone and all sorts of anti-depressants that would allow me to bury my feelings for her deep down in the back of my mind until she was gone.

         An hour ago, she was laying in her bed while a nurse pointed at a dancing cavalcade of x’s for me to sign so she could be released into my custody. I resented being here, but with her parents at their places of business, there was little else to be done. “Besides,” as they’d said to me the previous night, “you brought her there.” They then instructed me to feed her and drop her off at home before, and this they couldn’t stress enough, leaving immediately.

         “It would have been two years today, you know?”

         “What?”

         “Two years ago today, I guess was when this started.”

         “Yeah, I remember. Do you mean the carnival?”

         She nodded, not eating anymore, instead paying much more attention to my wavering countenance. My quiet denial of our relationship apparently didn’t fit in with her desire to reminisce and discuss our time together, however good or bad it may have been at times. The carnival, then, was the genesis of our time together. And if I could have foreseen the end of the road, maybe I wouldn’t have even taken it. I like to think that, with prior knowledge, knowing everything I know now, I would have done things differently. But…probably not. I’m not very smart.

         The air had a kind of richness to it, I remember; like when it’s really humid outside and it gets harder to breathe even on the short walks from the couch to the fridge when the windows are all open. But the air wasn’t leaden with moisture now, like it was in the abysmal Texas summers, so much as it had been utterly permeated by the cacophony of scents and chemicals and steam released into the world by the horridly unhygienic carnival. Cotton candy and gasoline and freshly cut grass all swirled about in the Fall breeze, confusing the living fuck out of my senses and making me sick to my stomach, unadulterated horror percolating into my brain at the thought of vomiting on my first date with this girl.

         Not altogether contributing to my nausea was the dazzling array of painfully loud colors(all the primary colors represented in their neon brilliance) spinning and twirling all about; besetting me on all sides with potential epileptic coma(although, it should be noted that I have not been conclusively proved to have epilepsy, I have not been proven to be decidedly, uh, un-epileptic, either) as I braved the throngs of carny folk and tourist alike. I bobbed and weaved through the obese families and skinny unwashed Cajuns that aimlessly roamed the fairgrounds in search of cheap thrills and high fructose treats.

         A brief break in the oppressive crowd affords me a glimpse of her standing beneath the Ferris wheel, dressed in a Run DMC shirt and blue jeans with giant black aviator glasses. She totally looked like a movie star and I suddenly became very conscientious of how strange I must have looked, dressed business casual for an interview I just oratorically fireworked. I had attempted to appear more casual by loosening my tie and rolling up my sleeves, but it just made me look like a politician at a town hall meeting trying to masquerade as a common man. She smirks from far away and taps her Hello Kitty watch with the pink plastic band impatiently, making no move to close the gap between us.

         And so the familiar dance began, the verbal sparring and quips that belied our insecurities and slowly allowed us to learn more about each other during the walk throughout the carnival. She told me as much about herself as she was comfortable with, I suppose; only child, like me, but her parents stayed together whereas my parents did what hers wished they could do and divorced, resolving to hate each other separately rather than together; she got good grades with little effort and participated in no clubs; her virginity was long gone(gulp) and she wasn’t looking for anything frivolous. Which was fine, I said. I wasn’t either, having made my laps around the man-slut track for an appropriate amount of time. I told her I didn’t miss waking up without pants, not knowing where I was, and turning over to find some poor damsel I was bound to distress by leaving with no note or trace other than the polluted condom in the trashcan or, let’s be more realistic, on the floor where I left it the night before with my dignity.

         She laughed. It was melodious and kind of high pitched, hella adorable. I’m not sure if penguins laugh, but I’m sure if they ever do, it will sound just like her and it will remind me of her, resplendent in all her complexity; perfections and imperfections alike constantly competing to become my favorite part of her. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that penguins do, in point of fact, already laugh, in which case, should it not sound adorable to you upon first listen, then, obviously, it didn’t sound like what I’m talking about and my comparison is as useless and impotent as I felt around her on a reasonably consistent basis. She explained it to me once, saying something to the effect that “[she] sculpts my raw ability and essence into something more presentable and coherent; like you’re clay waiting for me to make you into a pot”. Which, at the time, I took as a compliment, thinking that she meant that we worked well together, symbiotic perhaps, anything instead of what I dimly perceived to be the truth(being that I needed her to be complete).

         “Since you showed up so late, we’ll have to have a speed date before the park closes to see if this-” she made awkward gestures myself and her,”has any kind of chance of functioning.”

         “Oh good, no pressure or anything.”

         “None at all. But you only have 5 minutes to win me a stuffed bear before we have to continue the speed date. If you don’t win, I probably won’t kiss you. No pressure.” She winked. Adorable incarnate. I couldn’t breathe. I was just drowning in her wake and that’s why I felt like I was always treading water in our relationship.

         I think it took me something like 35 seconds to get the bear. Most of that time was spent searching out a booth that had a grotesquely over-sized pink plush bear with a rainbow stitched cruelly into its forehead just beside its right eye; the other 15 seconds consisted of me sending her to buy cotton candy while I paid the carny for the ridiculous bear. Any resulting “action”(being a double-entendre in this case, not only meaning an event or personal behavior but also a heavily implied tone of some form of penetration) that may have resulted from that kiss cost seven dollars, making her, in a very obscure and distant sense, a prostitute, but a prostitute nonetheless.

I make a big show of leaping up and down in utter triumph and success, proving just how much integrity I have. She smiles at me, using plenty of teeth, almost intentionally being adorable and overly boisterous to camouflage how broken she was, and leads me by the hand to the virtually deserted House Of Mirrors, removing a tightly rolled joint of medium thickness from the deep, glorious recesses of her ample cleavage. It seems that numerous women I’m acquainted with are predisposed to storing various objects within their bras. Typically, I see things like cell phones, cigarettes, lighters, index cards with notes on them or occasionally candy. There’s little supervision on this end of the carnival, being so close to closing and the Ferris Wheel being on the opposite end, making the use of illicit drugs that much easier. We hold hands and share a joint, her laying her head on my shoulder every so often as the high becomes too much.

         After a short stroll, we clamber into the House of Mirrors, a large building with black walls and white plaster columns littered about the open space, all attached to a multitude of mirrors sprawling throughout the room in a labyrinthine fashion. The paint had chipped and cracked, weather-worn patterns strewn on the surfaces of all the walls and columns, giving the whole spectacle a haggard, abandoned look. I was reasonably confident that I had seen this in a horror movie at one point or another. The light brown oak floors were warped and creaked with protest underneath my black Converse as we slowly drifted, hand in hand, through the winding and twisting maze in the amp joint haze.

She pauses and I don’t notice, walking until she pulls me back. With her small, delicate hands she held me face and looked into my eyes. Inebriated amidst the mirrors, she kisses me for the very first time and out of the corner of my eye I see the endless reflections of us locked for eternity in a perfect moment; like all the parallel versions of us across an infinite number of universes were precisely where they needed to be.

         “Yeah, the carnival.”

         “Our first kiss.”

         “…”

         “I still lo-“

         “Stop.”

         “What?”

         “It’s the last pure memory I have of us. Please don’t ruin it.”