William Wei
By Amie Barrodale
. I once
brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed
about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled
on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl
with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t remember
where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her.
She said that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the
bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that. I remember I
woke up with the cops in my house, asking me if I knew this girl. I said of
course, she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really
funny. After that, I didn’t drink for about five months. I was mostly celibate,
except for my upstairs neighbor, until she moved away. She was this Indian
girl. She liked to do it from behind, in this one position. That was the only
thing she wanted to do. The other things were boring, she said. When I went to
the shower, she got up on all fours to masturbate.
I was alone for a while after that. I got rid of everything in my
apartment. I worked ten- and twelve-hour days. Each night, I went to hot yoga.
They had a studio between my home and work, on the fifteenth floor of this
building, so that, across from you, while you were sweating, you could look in
at people living their lives, and see all these slow-moving domestic scenes,
like a man standing in front of a microwave. After yoga, I liked to walk home.
I liked the cold. I bought a Mediterranean style salad from the same place
every night. The woman who worked there was Lebanese and studying to be a
doctor. I ate my dinner in front of the TV, watching Sans Soleil.
It was a weeknight around ten P. M. the first
time she called. I let it go to voice mail, because I wasn’t expecting any
call, but when I went to get the message, it was just quiet for a while, and
then the person hung up. At that time, I slept on an army-style cot. I ate on
it, too, lying down with the food under my face, in the posture of a dog. This
was the posture I was in several days later, the fourth time she called, and I
answered.
“Who’s this?” I asked. She said, “It’s Koko.” “Koko? I don’t know any
Koko.” “I saw you at a party; it was a long time ago.” “Oh, so I gave you my
number?” “No, I got it from one of your friends.” “I don’t understand.” “He
told me your name is William.” “Who was he?” “I can’t tell you that. He said I
couldn’t tell you that. He said he was only telling me because he’s worried,
you don’t go out anymore. He said you just lie around watching the same movie
and eating the same food.” “That’s a lie,” I said. She said, “He said you do
hot yoga.” “I don’t even know what that is,” I said, “hold on.” I reached out
an arm and put the movie on pause. I put the container of salad under my cot
and propped myself up on my elbows. “What do you look like, anyway? Maybe I
remember seeing you.”
“I’m about forty-eight years old.”
“No,” I flipped over onto my back and put an arm over my eyes, “I can
tell from your voice you’re younger.”
“I’m attached to a breathing machine.”
“Okay, fine—don’t tell me, look, I’ve got to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that kind of joke—I mean, everybody says stuff like that. Why
can’t you just tell me what you look like?”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded shy now. She thought around and said, “I
guess I’m normal looking.”
“What’s normal?”
“I’m twenty-five. I have my hair cut into bangs.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t want to say any more than that.”
It was weird, because I looked at pornography pretty frequently at this
point. It was even a problem, so that I would spend an hour looking for the
most disgusting pictures I could find. Maybe disgusting is not the word. For
example, I liked a short video where an older man was fucking a girl in the ass
while he put a Blow Pop inside her. Then he stopped and put it into her ass.
Then he put it into her mouth, and he started to fuck her again. But somehow
this conversation ...
We talked for a long time, more than an hour, until I got sleepy, so I
started to fall asleep with her on the phone. The next night, around the same
time, she called me again. I was really happy she did that. We had a nice
conversation. She told me this story, how she used to prank call a math teacher
of hers in junior high. She did it so much, she figured out how to reprogram
his outgoing message, using his two-digit remote-access code. She redid his
outgoing greetings, said things that were explicitly sexual. Her teacher didn’t
understand technology or remote-access codes. He assumed someone was breaking
into his house each day to rerecord his message. It filled him with fear and
paranoia. He bought a dog. He had an alarm installed and got a prescription for
sleeping pills. It was a long time—nearly a year—before the police identified
Koko and got to the bottom of the mystery. I loved that. I have stories like
that, too. I told her the thing I did to my video teacher at an arts festival,
and the things I used to say to my science teacher and to the owner of this
antique store called J. & B. Lowther. I said, “Why don’t you come over here
right now?” and she told me she lived five hours away by train.
She had a business selling old clothing on the Internet. She was a night
owl. She stayed up until sunrise pretty frequently, working on her business.
All the clothes had to be cleaned, pressed, tried on, photographed, and entered
into her Web site. By this time I had seen a lot of photos of her body. She used
herself as a model, and the way she did it was very artistic. I’m not just
saying that because I cared about her; I worked with major fashion houses, so I
know what I’m saying. She really was artistic about how she did it, even though
she always chopped her own head off. She made it look exciting and interior,
like she was a party of one. In fact, she had a lot of admirers on the
Internet. It wasn’t just gross men; it was women in fashion, too. That’s how it
happened we were at the same party.
“What party was it?” I asked. “I don’t think there was any party.”
“They had set up a small stage on the roof, with that carpet rubber as a
stage. That foam stuff they put under carpets.”
“I remember that. That was a terrible party.”
“You looked really drunk.”
“I think I was really sad; I wish you had come and talked to me.”
“You were talking to some other girls. You were always talking to lots
of girls. I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me.”
“I’m sure I wanted to.”
I knew that she drank, and most nights she was talking to me, she was
drunk and taking pills, but I didn’t think anything about it. She never
slurred, or got sloppy, but she did seem sometimes to check out. It was like
her heart would go dead. It was one time when she was like this that she told
me she had had other romances on the telephone. I said I didn’t care about
that. She said, “You don’t understand; I’m a sociopath.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hold on.”
She was gone for a while, and when she came back, she said, “All I mean
is, what if when you see me, you think I’m ugly?”
“I’m not going to think you’re ugly.”
“You’ve never even seen my face. I could be completely deformed.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’d love you even if you were deformed.”
I guess that was a mistake. After I said it, she got really quiet. Then
she said something weird. She said, “All my life, I’ve been looking for my man.
I think I finally found you.” I think that was the moment, for both of us, when
we realized it wouldn’t happen. It was the next day, I think, that she started
to tell me something about her mother being sick, but I could tell she didn’t
want to talk about it. Besides, I had already bought a ticket.
On the train, I kept telling myself to just be myself. I had a
prescription for a low-milligram antianxiety medication, as well as a mild
beta-blocker, and I kept going into the bathroom to take more—I wanted to get
the mixture right. After I took a pill, I’d check myself in the mirror, and I’d
always be surprised at what I found. I kept expecting to find a monster.
At the station I checked my phone, and she’d left me this message where
she just said my whole name, William Wei. She sounded completely freaked out. I
knew her pretty well by this time. I could tell from how she sounded, it took
everything in her not to run.
She was waiting across the street from the terminal. Just standing
there, in front of her old car. She had on a green army coat and
paint-splattered corduroy pants; her features were something like I
pictured—wide eyes, Frida Kahlo—but she was more beautiful than I expected her
to be.
When I got over to her car, before I could say anything, she said, “Are
you nervous?”
“Are you?”
“We’ll go to my house and relax.”
In the car ride, she kept switching the tapes in her tape deck, and
peering at me while she did it. I could tell she didn’t like what she was
seeing, but I didn’t know what to do. I thought she had already seen me. I
thought I was the one who was permitted to feel some disappointment.
She lived on the top floor of a converted flour mill. The sleeping area
was the size of an ordinary bedroom, divided from the main area by ten-foot
industrial shelves full of record albums—the inventory from her brother’s
store. He was itinerant and sometimes wrote to her, asking her to sell so many
feet of albums. Her bed was a queen-size mattress on the floor. She pointed to
the rotary phone beside it and lifted her cat to introduce him by name. Then
she led me through the center portion of the loft, past a sliding-glass door
that connected to another apartment, a place rented to someone named Douglas.
He was gone for the weekend, and so I didn’t think much about him.
I don’t think I will describe her kitchen or her work area, except a
photo on the fridge. It was of an old man in a top hat and tails. She told me
that was Douglas. I was about to tell her a story that the photo reminded me of
when she handed me a piece of banana bread, a glass of milk, and two pills.
“What’re these?” I said.
“My mom sent them to me earlier in the week. Something about her
bowels.”
“What?”
“She can’t have opiates.”
“They’re opium?”
“Percocet.”
I ate the pills and broke the bread into pieces. What I wanted was for
the two of us to go and sit by the window and listen to record albums and get
soulful, but Koko turned on the TV and flipped through the stations until she
found a documentary. When that was over, she got a couple more pills for us,
and found a medley on a different station. We got take-out from a delivery
service, and around eleven, her hair had fallen down, and her cheek was resting
on her hand so the top of her head just touched my shoulder. I still have the
shirt I was wearing at that time. It’s hanging in my closet. I turned on my
side to look at her body, and she pretended to keep watching TV.
I said, “I like your shoes.”
“Those?” she lifted her head and turned to look at her feet. “Those are
ballet slippers.”
“I like how you are wearing them as shoes.”
“Everyone does that.”
“Everyone does what?”
She shook her head lightly from side to side.
“Everyone does what?” I said.
“I travel business class,” she pointed a finger in the air. “Un momento, por favor. Muchas
gracias, señor.”
She was singing along with the television, but I stopped her before the
next line. I mean I kissed her. It was a bit like kissing a doll, or a timid
old lady. I mean that she didn’t kiss me back, but I don’t know if you know
this. That can be very attractive. Later, Koko and I were together in haze, and
her shirt was off, and she told me how she often induced men to love her and
then abandoned them. She said, “Didn’t you notice how I forced this on you?” I
said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and she said, “Yeah. That’s what I’m
telling you.”
So that was where it ended. Or really, it ended in the car, the first
time we looked at each other. I mean, she thought I was ugly, and I could see
that. But the thing about a dark truth is it is indistinguishable from doubt.
And so—since I couldn’t just go home—I kept approaching the dark area. Not by
anything I said, but by what I did, and by watching how she reacted. She was nice
at times, but at others, when her kindness drew me in, she was sharp, and I
spent the weekend confused. I kept thinking, “But she already saw my face.”
The next morning I was buttoning my shirt in the mirror when Koko opened
her eyes. She yawned and smiled at my reflection and said, “You have a nice
face.” Then she pushed herself up onto all fours and shifted her butt in
the air. She rested her cheek sideways on her folded arms and said, “We should
go and eat eggs.”
I wonder why I didn’t say anything to her then. Like, “Why are you
putting your butt in the air?” I guess it was because I didn’t know what was
going on. I had gotten clammed up, by the stuff the night before. I was shaky
from the pills.
The restaurant was walking distance away. It was one of those
local-ingredients places. It had polished stone floors, and the polish was so
high that when the hostess led us into the dining room, I thought there was a
step up, but there wasn’t one. It was just a trick of the light.
“What’re you doing?” Koko said.
“I thought it was a step.”
“You were like,” she galloped one leg in imitation.
Everything I did made her angry. After we had our omelets, she pointed
to a place between two of her teeth and said, “What’s that thing there?” I have
a large filling between two of my teeth about where she was pointing, so I told
her that—“It’s a filling”—and she said, “I can see it when you talk.”
We went for a walk around the neighborhood. It was starting to feel like
spring. We crossed into a residential area. On the sidewalk, one leashed dog
was meeting another dog, and he got so excited he lost his footing and fell
down on his side. An old suburban house was up for sale, and we let ourselves
into its backyard to have a look around. One of its windows had been broken from
the inside, and the pane lay in four pieces in the soil of a flower bed. I
brushed my hand against Koko’s, and she whipped her head around and said, “Do
you want to take mushrooms?”
“What?”
“I have ten.”
They were mixed into chocolates. They had been given to her by a friend,
a photographer for Playboy. She said that several
times, Playboy. She ate two chocolates
and I ate one, and then we split a fourth. We got into her bed, and when I
opened my eyes an hour later, the world was brilliant, alien, and unformed, and
Koko was talking on the phone in the voice of a transistor radio.
“I’m fucked up,” she said. “I’m on mushrooms. I’m on drugs.”
“Yes, he’s here since Friday.”
“No, I don’t think so. No. Not anything like that. Hold on,” she pushed
the phone aside and said, “I’m talking to Douglas.”
I was really confused, so I went to get some air. I stood up out of the
bed and went to look out the window. I stuck my head out and looked down at the
alley, where a homeless man was digging through the garbage for glass bottles.
I was really messed up, so I couldn’t remember what to do. I was trying to
remember if it was proper to throw money down at him. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t
right, but I couldn’t figure out why, so I leaned back into the apartment and
went to find my wallet. I looked for it out in the front room, and then I
remembered where I left it. Yes, I was thinking, it definitely was what you
did: you threw the money down. That was when I realized that Koko had put the
phone down, and she was crying. She had been explaining, for how long I am not
sure, that her mother had cancer. She told me that her mother had cancer of the
bowels. I tried to console her; I sat beside her and put an arm around her
shoulders. She let me hold her for a second, and then she stood up, and in a
moment, she had her keys, and a door slammed, and she was gone. The cat was
doing a little dance with its claws, that dance that’s somehow associated with
cat sex, and I was alone on her bed. It wasn’t until recently I realized that
whole thing about her mother was a lie. Besides, when I was consoling her, I
wasn’t really consoling her at all.
Anyway, it was a long time before she came back. The sorts of things I
thought during that time, while I sat there, I can never really say. It was
heavy. I think that’s what people say—it was a bad trip; it was heavy. I think
I can safely say it changed my life.
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