In the morning, Jarrod went to his first service call. While he adjusted the satellite, he saw himself pulling weeds from the perimeter of the girl’s rental. He saw himself kneeling at the girl’s feet, painting her toes the same tangerine color of the horse lamp. After Jarrod got the satellite working, he called in sick for the rest of the day and drove himself to the girl’s house. On the stoop, he felt weak and out of sorts from the heat and lack of sleep, but he knocked and knocked until a long-haired guy, shirtless and sleepy-eyed, opened the door.
“You better not be selling anything,” the guy said. “I got enough cookies and God.” Behind the guy, Oreo rose with some struggle. He staggered to the door and peeked through the guy’s knees and thumped his tail when he saw Jarrod.
“I’m friends with your roommate,” Jarrod said. “I came to talk to her.”
“Penny’s not here,” he said. “She’s gone.”
“I’m not looking for Penny,” Jarrod said. “I’m looking for Marie.”
The guy raised one foot and bent his knee and pushed backwards on Oreo’s snout with his heel. “No Marie lives here,” he said. “You got the wrong place.”
Jarrod said nothing. He watched Oreo retreat from the foyer and lie down, hard and fast like he’d been shot. “She had red hair,” Jarrod finally said. “Crooked teeth.”
The guy nodded. “That’s Penny,” he said. “The liar. You can come in and see for yourself that she ain’t here.”
The guy opened the door and motioned inside and Jarrod came in. Oreo got up in pained loyalty and nosed Jarrod in the crotch. “She even left her goddamn dog,” the guy said. “What am I going to do with a goddamn dog?”
Jarrod felt more sand fall away from the dune inside him. Shelf after shelf broke free. He went down the long, narrow hall with the guy and the dog at his heels and when he got to the door, he paused with his hand on the plastic gold doorknob and squeezed his eyes shut and he saw nothing.
“Go on,” the guy said. “I don’t have all day.” Jarrod took a deep breath and turned the knob. “I mean, I do have all day,” the guy said. “But this ain’t how I planned on spending it.”
Inside, the room was as bright as a cathedral. The sun poured in the single window and the walls were so drenched in light they didn’t even look pink. On the floor, the mattress was bare. The clothes were gone and the towels were gone and the foil-wrapped TV was gone. All that remained was the little horse lamp and Jarrod went over to it and kneeled.
“Penny was a mess,” the guy said. “Always will be.”
Jarrod clicked the lamp on and clicked the lamp off. In the bright white of the day, he couldn’t tell a difference between the two. He unplugged the lamp and wrapped the cord around it and stood.
“Take it,” the guy said. “It’s yours.”
Jarrod clutched the lamp to his chest and pushed past the guy and past the thumping dog and ran out into the day. In the van, he sat for a long while, panting, working to catch his breath, working to convince himself that he didn’t have a problem, but that he’d solved one. On the dashboard, more pollen had collected like blown sand. When he could finally breathe normally, Jarrod took the horse lamp off his lap and placed it next to him on the bench seat. He put it right in the middle, like a child placed between the two people who had made it.
BJORN
BY THE TIME Bianca turned twelve, there had been twelve doctors in total. If Bianca’s mother had had her way, there would have been twelve hundred. The only reason her mother stopped with the doctor train was because Bianca’s father threatened to leave, with his wallet, if she continued. Still, Bianca’s cyst was her mother’s whole life, and Bianca’s mother’s obsession with the cyst was Bianca’s whole childhood.
The cyst protruded from Bianca’s forehead in a way that was hardly noticeable to most people but caught the light in a way that was always noticeable to Bianca’s mother.
“It looks like you’ve run into a door,” her mother would say, squinting at Bianca’s hairline. “Like you’ve given yourself a goose egg. I’m afraid people think you’re clumsy.”
Eleven of the twelve doctors said the same thing to Bianca and her mother: “It’s a dermoid cyst. There’s really no reason to remove it.”
The twelfth doctor said the same plus some. “It’s what we call a ‘vanished twin.’ It never developed in your womb,” he pointed to Bianca’s mother, “so your forehead absorbed it,” he pointed to Bianca. The doctor leaned his face so close to Bianca’s as he made this pronouncement that she could smell what he’d had for lunch—Italian sub. “It’s nothing to fret over. I see these all the time.” He scribbled something on a prescription pad and handed it to Bianca’s mother. “There’s no need for surgery unless it turns problematic. Now scoot, young lady! Live your life!”
In the car, Bianca’s mother wept. Bianca hoped it was because her mother was blaming herself, but she knew it was because the doctor had deemed neither the cyst, nor Bianca, problematic. Bianca tried to remember a time her mother had looked her in the eye and not at her forehead, but she could not think of a time like that. As they drove out of the parking lot, Bianca pulled the prescription from her mother’s purse. “Get bangs!” was all it said.
That night, Bianca read in an old encyclopedia that dermoid cysts produced their own hair and teeth and fingernails. In the accompanying color illustrations, she saw dissected cysts that she knew she would never forget. Some of them looked like beefsteak tomatoes cut open and jammed with cat fur and seed pearls. That day, Bianca saw herself for what she really was: a host for a monster.
When she went away to college, Bianca finally followed the twelfth doctor’s orders and cut thick bangs to hide the cyst. She began sleeping with whomever, wherever. Boys, girls, teachers. Beds, floors, bleachers. Her efforts worked until they didn’t. By sophomore fall, a recurring nightmare had begun. Desperate and haunted, Bianca went to see the campus psychologist.
“I have this dream that a baby hatches from my temple,” Bianca said, quietly and ashamed. “It’s my long-lost brother, and my father is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”
The counselor put a hand over his mouth and cleared his throat. Both gestures, Bianca could tell, hid his amusement. She was so humiliated, she never went back—to the counselor or to school. For a week, she slept in her car. She cried and cursed and cradled her forehead. On the eighth day, she bought the webcam and rented the furnished apartment. On the ninth day, she began undressing for strangers on the internet. She made no attempt to hide her identity, only her forehead, and with the money she earned, she had necessities delivered to her front stoop: soup and toilet paper and tampons, lipstick and push-up bras and thongs.
For months, Bianca didn’t leave her apartment for any reason or person or thing. She kept the blinds drawn and let her skin turn the color of skim milk. She sent her parents a postcard telling them she had left school for a stable job and that she didn’t know when she would see them next. Bianca knew her mother was frantic. Not because she wanted to see Bianca, but because she needed to see the cyst.
Bianca did not go home for Christmas, but she did send her parents a gift box of twelve Royal Verano pears. They cost her fifty dollars, but they were perfect. On the internet, Bianca zoomed in on the pears and knew her parents would approve; they were nestled in their padded crates like one dozen flawless foreheads. She had them shipped certified mail so her parents would have to sign for them.