Oh! she cried, and brought a hand up to her face weakly. Her hands were carved from ivory tusks, glorious animals had died so that Quinn could have those hands, elegantly enormous, veined like cocks, slender and powerful and promising of thrall.
Fearing that the being would lie there blissing out on her violet visions forever, Michelle completed her roll, butting up against Quinn like an animal brought to shore by a persistent current. She brought her lips over and Quinn kissed her back and it was soft soft soft like a dreamtime enchanted forest and they were two children dropped down into a fairy ring. Oh my god, Michelle thought, I think we’re making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to rake each other’s skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles. But the tenderness thrilled Michelle and she reconsidered the phrase: making love. It so repulsed Stitch that when forced to she used the abbreviated ML. But Michelle loved love. Heroin was love, the generic of love, what you got if you couldn’t afford the original. The approximation was fine by Michelle. It was a wonderful mimic. Michelle and this being were in love and when they brought their bodies together they made even more love. It was pretty awesome. And then Quinn took the formidable length of her body and used it to subdue Michelle, easily, for Michelle was such a shrimp and so deliciously weakened by the drug. Powerless beneath her lover’s crushing physique she struggled lightly, enough to rouse the being, who stilled her with her jaw like a mother cat hushing a kitten. Michelle’s wiggles calmed and from her mouth came teasing, doped-up whimpers. The being slid her hand deftly into Michelle’s underwear and asked, You like to get fucked, huh? and it was on.
11
Then the van got stolen. There was a dizzying minute when Michelle spun around the empty parking spot, discombobulated. She’d moved it, hadn’t she? She had left it right there, yes, yes. She reeled, looking at the landmarks. Near the free clinic where she had gotten her most recent HIV test. Near the discount grocery store with the intense lighting, where that food riot had happened a few months ago. Right there. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t there. Michelle stood hapless and blinking, waiting for it to tool around the corner, a cartoon van with winking eyes where its headlights should be. Just kidding! It would honk its weak little honk. That didn’t happen.
The sun skulked lower in the sky, then lower still. The bastard sun had shone upon the thievery, done nothing to stop it. Stolen in broad daylight! The insult of it. As if she had been doubly tricked, as if she should have been able to stop it simply because she had been awake. But Michelle had been at work, at the bookstore. Hanging out in the Self-Help section. She liked to read books about alcoholism and personality disorders to assure herself that neither was a problem in her life. When she finished pretending to organize Self-Help she moved over to New Age and consoled herself with astrology books. Aquarians weren’t really prone to addiction, that was more Scorpio’s jam. Sagittarians could also get out of hand, Cuidado, Ziggy! Michelle felt better already.
That afternoon Michelle walked sadly through the Mission. The day’s smog was a thin gas in the air, growing weaker with the sun’s disappearance. There was that smell in the air all the time, the tinny stink of environmental collapse. The fog clung to Michelle’s glasses and wouldn’t come off, her view of life perpetually smeared. She decided to get sushi. We Be was empty, she sat in the window and gazed out the mucky glass. What will I do? Michelle thought. Police report. She remembered when carrots were more plentiful, how they would be gratis in a little glass cup on the tables. Michelle didn’t care about vegetables but missed the orange cheer of them. The walls of the sushi restaurant were marked with broad Xs over fish that had gone extinct. Michelle ordered a cucumber roll and a bowl of rice.
Okay, a police report. Then what? Rent a moving truck. But Michelle couldn’t get a moving truck, she didn’t have a driver’s license. Or, she realized, a credit card. Did you need a credit card? Michelle had a debit card from the credit union. It only worked at the ATM machine at the co-op grocery store. Maybe Michelle wasn’t equipped for life outside her immediate vicinity. Too Bad, she told herself darkly. Her room was already rented out, she’d been swiftly replaced. Ekundayo couldn’t wait for her to leave, and Stitch — Stitch was hurt by Michelle’s move. She felt abandoned. She wasn’t going to beg Michelle to stay in their rotting home, notching off the days with knife marks in their arms. Fine, go, see if I care. It had been Stitch who had sourced Michelle’s replacement. A girl from Olympia, Washington. Olympia still had living trees, why would this girl come to busted San Francisco? Michelle thought scornfully. But she was leaving for Los Angeles. You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.
Michelle would find someone to drive her to Los Angeles. Maybe her new friend, Quinn. Could Quinn get permission from her husband to go on a road trip with her lesbian, heroin-snorting new friend? That’s not what I am, Michelle scolded herself.
Once in Los Angeles Michelle would have no car. She thought about this and gave an internal shrug. So what, she’d be another carless loser in Los Angeles. Michelle was used to being various sorts of losers. You weren’t a loser if you didn’t drive in San Francisco, though. You were sort of a hero. Even more so if you biked, which Michelle didn’t. She tried to once, when an ex had given her an old mountain bike, and within five days she had almost been run over by a fire truck and had wiped out hugely on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission, directly in front of the bus shelter, trying to drink coffee and ride at the same time. She’d been wearing a plaid skirt that had once belonged to a Catholic schoolgirl when she bailed. Her knees were raw and everyone at the bus stop just stared. Michelle had laughed grandly, to make them feel more comfortable with her accident, but they all just continued to stare.
Michelle would not be riding any bikes in Los Angeles but she’d figure it out. She loved taking buses and trains, it gave her time to read books. Everything was going to be just fine, Michelle assured herself, as her sushi was delivered.
12
Some mornings later the doorbell rang at Michelle’s house. The noise of it gave her bad flashbacks of the days of Andy loitering outside her house, leaning against her amazing car, her tattooed arms folded protectively around her heart, looking at Michelle with kill eyes. No one ever rang the bell at Michelle’s house. Cautiously, Michelle edged to the window. She was hungover but not too bad — her body was becoming accustomed to the heroin, her mornings weren’t ruined with the residual poison, she had learned to metabolize it. She was proud of her mysterious body and its strange wisdoms, its hardiness and strength. Was there nothing she couldn’t endure?
She slid up to the windows, concerned about her nudity. The gauzy curtains hid nothing from the street, they were but decorative pink ponytails framing the face of her bedroom. She edged against the wall and craned her head toward the glass. A cop car was double parked outside, taking up space with an air of entitlement, its angle on the street jaunty, careless.
It’s The Police! Michelle gasped, terrified. What had she done? Michelle looked at her desk. Small and rickety and scarred with chipped black paint, it held the remains of last night’s indulgence. The spoon and the lighter and the gutted ballpoint pen. The yellowy bag of cocaine that came with one and ones, the worst cocaine you had ever seen. For a while she’d been snorting it, hoping it would take the nauseous edge off her high, but now that her tolerance had improved she didn’t really need it. It sat there, packaged inside a twisted shred of Saran Wrap. Evidence.