SICKOS
Deb Olin Unferth
—Remember we wanted to grow up and be prostitutes? she says. N has not seen her in sixteen years. There are milkshakes and paper napkins and tall stools and long legs swinging, not N’s. N’s legs are short. The other is swinging her long legs and playing with her straw and saying, Remember we used to talk about it? About being prostitutes?
—N does not remember talking about being a prostitute but she concedes it is possible. She does not deny things have occurred and have been attributed to her even though she does not remember them. What she does remember is that this friend, her friend from childhood, had disappeared quite suddenly many years ago after an episode involving the police and a certain stepfather, not the first stepfather of the friend and maybe not a stepfather proper, maybe just a man living with the friend’s mother, but anyway she vanished and N had always felt a little question by her name, as in: where? And also by N’s own name, on account of this friend, had always thought that she, N, might have been a different person had she not lost her.
—And now N has found her—through a search, admittedly an unheroic one, a search where she did not have to climb mountains or cross seas or go downtown and poke around in a box of unmatched mittens, did not even have to leave her chair, but merely had to think about her friend and press a few buttons, which makes her think it should be called a summoning, not a search. A subpoena, perhaps.
—This is what this friend says about the means through which N found her: You know, you can make money off it, she says. That’s one way to do it. I do a little of it, she says, now and then.
—Ah, says N.
—All you do, she says, pointing a straw at N, is write one little line. Write: Put on pink panties and send them to me. Then you get a post-office box. And then when they send you a little money, write them a little more. Tell them to paint their toenails pink and send you a picture. Order them to do it. And they will. And they’ll send you money too.
—Really, says N.
—But, she says, don’t ever say you’ll meet them in person. No matter how cute they are. It’s a mind game and that blows it.
—I don’t think I’d be tempted, N says.
—You’d be surprised, she says. Some of my guys are cuties.
—But, she says, mostly I work in the flesh.
And next there is a month or two where N and the friend are becoming friends again and N feels good she can be of some help at last, a friend to her friend. And N decides she will not object to the friend’s profession, will never say one word against it. The men do not have sex with her, the found-again friend, after all. She pees on them or attaches a clothespin here or there or gives them a sound spanking. This friend had a rough upbringing. N might have done something. Intervened or asked her mom to or looked for a professional, wherever those are, gotten somebody to right the thing. But it is not about that. It is a profession like any other profession with appointments and equipment and supplies and offices and dress codes and so forth. It is not a moral issue.
—Do you believe in God? this friend asks N.
—No, says N.
—That’s okay. I can still be friends with you, she says.
—The friend, it turns out, is very vaguely very religious. A fact which N ponders but cannot link to any system of logic with which she is familiar. On slow days, the friend calls and asks N to come over for fellowship.
—N considers. What is fellowship? Like converting?
—N would prefer to go to the movies.
At the matinee, the lost-and-found friend whispers though the credits. This sicko, she says, I almost choked him. He wanted me to pass a movement into his mouth.
—Can you do that on command? N wants to know.
—Baby Ruth bars, the friend explains. I store them in the freezer. When I’m getting ready, I run in the kitchen and pop one up my butt. But today real shit came out.
N is happy her friend doesn’t drink anymore or do crank, which she did in California. This friend spent a few years there and still, at inopportune moments, will suddenly scream for N to stop the car at busy intersections so she can bound into the check-cash and wire money to a child she left there, a girl, in California
—The friend tells N about the father of the child. He was in and out of jail all the time, says the friend. She lived in a house by the prison and he’d come and go, in and out, all the time. But then she got the idea he was trying to kill her. One time she was going to get in bed and it looked funny, dark sort of, and she had a feeling, she just knew, so she went to the switchbox and shut off the electricity and then, what do you know, the bed was soaking wet and she turned over the covers and there was a live wire in there. So she could be dead right now. And then another time he attached a bomb to the light switch but right before she turned on the light, she suspected, had that feeling again, and she got someone to come over and disarm it because she knows people who can do that sort of thing, disarm bombs. And then she packed up and moved out, pregnant and broke. Even though she loved him.
—N is impressed that she knew what to do.
—N does not know where the switchbox in her building is. But anyway, she doesn’t believe anyone would try to electrocute her.
Two men, one of whom will shortly become the friend’s boyfriend, are in the car. N’s friend says, I know a man who teaches philosophy and art history at a very important university and he paints and he painted me and he is famous and so there is a very important and expensive picture of me in the world.
—N says, How on earth do you know this man
—Sicko, N’s friend mouths behind her hand.
The man who becomes N’s friend’s boyfriend is very dumb and smiley. N cannot believe how dumb and smiley he is. Now N phones and he answers like a bodyguard. He knows six words. One of them is dinner. One of them is his name. N comes over for the former and he thumps around, grinning like a fool. We got his penis pierced, the found-again friend says. Come here, honey, let me show.
—N doesn’t want to see. The boyfriend doesn’t want to show. He grins and backs off. But still we see. Everyone sees the penis. Out it comes and is flipflopped back and forth for N to examine the stud and the ring. It is not hard. The friend flip-flops it around like a tortilla.
—N is trying to be open-minded. N is trying to respect what each creature does on this broad, pulsing earth.
—N’s friend is between apartments which is a very bad thing for a woman of her profession to be. Awoman of her profession is rarely between jobs like other people because there is always another sicko out there but a woman like this must have her space to work in. And so when one landlord has decided he has had enough of her sickos and another has not yet received the rent because she has wired it away to California and when the boyfriend of a woman like this lives with his mother, well, a woman like this is caught tight as a baby in a momma’s cunt, as the friend says, and asks for favors she would never ever ask for unless it were an absolute and complete emergency, which it is, so can she?
—Sure, says N. My apartment is free all day.
—She arrives in a taxi like a movie star, with sunglasses and luggage and even a kitten in a carrying case. N watches her take out the equipment. Paddles and whips and plastic sheets and leather outfits and little-girl dresses and five-inch heels and ropes and knives and boards. N gathers her own meager briefcase of papers and files and hurries out saying she’ll phone before she leaves work.
—N sits at work for eight hours and she cannot believe or imagine what is happening in her apartment. She is trying not to imagine, not to see her belongings amid the events taking place. Finally she phones and there is no answer, not even the machine picking up. N puts the phone down and starts to sweat. N is thinking: What the hell was N thinking? She is thinking: All she knows is this friend is an ex-crank addict, and of a questionable profession and is bringing questionable clients into her apartment. And N, as she picks up the phone again, dials her own number over and over, starts imagining a sicko has gutted the friend, cleaned out the apartment, and N will never see friend or answering machine again.
—How could N let this happen?
—So she tears home on the expressway, panic stabbing at her heart because what kind of a friend would let a kind-of friend stay mixed up in this kind of business? And what kind of trouble could she herself get in? The friend could be hung like a curtain. The friend could be choked on her own movements. Who knows, she thinks desperately. Outside the car, the sky and strip of land are a deep leaden gray.
—But when she arrives, runs up the stairs and throws open the door, there is the friend, a tall stark sad figure in N’s small apartment and the cat has jumped into the fish tank and somehow the friend has accidentally unplugged the phone from the wall and she has not made enough money for the rent and she has sorrow burning on her face and she is burning with the urge to run to the check-cash and send the few meager twenties she made to her daughter in California, whom she misses and prays for every single day and night of her life, and can she please stay one more day?
—And N is burning with the urge to soothe and fix, slay stepfathers and any other ugly thing in the world because when she stands like that, so tall and stark, she looks just like she did when they were kids and the friend was so unhappy and N knew it, even then, and had done nothing, and N says, Of course, of course, as long as you like, as long as you need.
—But please no cat, says N. N is allergic to cats.
—So the boyfriend shows up to pick up the cat and he’s got a friend with him who doesn’t fit in the apartment. N’s friend takes N aside. He’s the tallest man in the world, says the friend. But don’t bring it up.
—He used to be in the freak show, she says. They kept him in a giant-sized cage and tossed food in at him. He’s still sensitive about it. Very sad.
—And he certainly is tall, slouching and bending over under the ceiling. His hands are the size of chairs and he knocks things over as he walks. He lumbers through, following N. Want to have dinner? Go to a movie? he says.
—No, N says. No.
—He keeps asking. His face is the size of a table. Why not? You got something against tall guys?
—Hey, he says. I’m not a pervert like these two.
—It’s nine at night and they’re all still there. The boyfriend and the tallest man in the world are watching a game, shouting along with it, the boyfriend breaking into song. N is sunk in a chair alone in the kitchen. The friend comes in and lays a hand on hers.
—Are you gay? the friend asks.
—N looks up, wild-eyed.
—Do you like girls? It’s okay if you do.
—N may like girls but she isn’t ready to discuss it.
—Because I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if you’ll let me go down on you, she says. In front of a client, of course.
—Day two, that morning, N believes her friend has been going through her files. Certain items are out of order, not that her items are so orderly, but she does believe certain papers are out of place, that is, had been placed by her and now are in another place close by, or are in the same place in a different way, maybe. And this is upsetting, especially since she is still upset about the phone, the cat, the game, the tallest man in the world, his offer, her offer, etc., and since now she is getting ready to leave for work and is leaving the friend to work at what she works at, rummaging, plotting, bomb-disarming, peeing. So N sets a series of traps around the apartment. Pieces of paper sticking out a few inches this way and that so if files are moved, paper will fall or shift and her friend will be revealed.
—See you tonight, says N.
—N is shifty as paper. And smart. She waits at work all day. She does not call. The hours pass according to plan. She comes home at the proper hour. Yoo hoo! she calls as she unlocks the door, sticks her head in the kitchen. No answer. She walks through the apartment. No one. She lunges for the filing cabinet. Fallen! Papers fallen and shifted about and her friend is caught, has failed the test, and for one glorious moment N is victorious, vindicated! Her friend has abused her and her home! —Until the next moment, when she thinks, Not that it makes any difference.
—Until the moment after that, when she thinks, Have the papers in fact fallen? She believes so but it’s hard to tell. They may fall when N opens the drawer. They may fall just sitting in the drawer. Gravity, it’s called. She begins to conduct a test.
—Until the moment after that when she hears a noise coming from the bedroom. A voice. And another. She realizes her friend is here and with a client. There is a client in her home with her in it. Is N home early? Perhaps. Abit. She is terrified. Guiltily she runs through the kitchen and out the door. She hurries up to the bakery. She will buy dessert and wait a little and then go back bearing sweets. Instead she sits on a curb and madly, methodically, eats both desserts, two enormous cinnamon rolls as big as her head.
—She goes back to the apartment and her friend is there, alone, sitting on the bed, innocent as a baby in a mother’s cunt, N thinks.
—I heard you, says N. I heard voices.
—I didn’t even know you came in, says the friend. I had him folding your panties.
—N runs to the dresser and there they are, her underwear, folded and stacked by a sicko.
—Somewhere the friend’s beeper is going off. The friend gets up and N realizes: The friend is wearing N’s jeans, short and tight as a baby in a mother’s cunt.
—Did you go through my filing cabinet? N asks.
—In this manner and in these ways, pieces of paper shift and fall. And soon the friend makes her money, packs up her equipment, boyfriend, tallest man in the world, and they all ride off into the sunset. And she phones, for months, the friend phones, shouts into the machine in a little girl voice, Are you okay? I’m worried about you! I don’t care what’s going on, if you need help, I’m there, I’m down for you girl, whatever’s going on. And N is not surprised by these messages because she is finally seeing, in a blurry-edged way, just who thought who was helping who all those months, N and her long lost friend. Just who disappeared forever and who sought who, who got followed around by the man from the freak show.
—In these ways, pieces of paper shift, new files form, lines are erased and redrawn and N works daily on this alone in her catless apartment and all these too are not meant to be looked at by others, long lost friends or otherwise.