In his trance, he’d taken two fingers. I didn’t know this at the time — they told me a few days later.
[points to a constellation, almost directly above]
See? Can you see her, Bruce? That’s her throne. See? See it? Tonight, she’s right-side up — all’s well with the world. Back on her throne where she belongs. As am I…
Okay, back to the parking lot!
There was this gust out his mouth — a stench — then he started spewing waste like a broken pipe. I probably thought he was coming… in my hallucinatory state. He lifted himself. Floated above me then stood straight up but as if not by his own power. It was eerie, like a crazy puppet pulled by unseen strings, something superhuman, something abominable had plucked him off me. I can still see his mouth as the body was dragged off, that septic mouth, smiley face crapmouth unleashing a torrent of bright, brackish blood. And that, my friend, was that. His invisible predator retreated to the lot’s far corner to fuss over its exsanguinated prey while someone wrapped something around my hand. That would be Kura. He used his shirt as a tourniquet, leaving him bare-chested in the cold, a very Kura move, the swashbuckling touch! I’m sure he knew I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the gesture but he did it anyway. (That, my friend, is style.) I know I smiled at him. I was smiling at everyone, especially Mama Cassiopeia — I was already pinned up there, clueless, to the topsy-turvy night.
Then upside-down I went, and fainted dead away.
I awakened in a too-bright room that smelled of ether and fast food.
Loud voices, laughter, shushing. Kura hovered close to Coat and Shabby Tie, who gave a tidy running commentary on my needle tracks — I had an abscess on the inside of my elbow — and couldn’t stop throwing up. Blood-soaked compress on hand and under rib… those cigarettes he was smoking — not Kura, but Coat and Shabby Tie — the ones that smell like weed and incense and cheap Egyptian perfume—clove. Oh, and Coat and Shabby was most assuredly a doctor because I knew my doctors. This one was pasty, late 40s, an abortionist-type out of Faulkner, with the missed-train look of one who’d burned his adrenals for a middling cause at too young an age. Or a tragic one — maybe on a balmy summer night, he’d backed out of the driveway and run over his kid.
Apparently the boyfriend’s knife found a relatively safe spot under the ribs and I’ll never know if the Nameless One missed the arteries and vital organs on purpose. Probably. He was a precise motherfucker, would’ve been a helluva surgeon in another life. I’ll never know what the Abominable Puppeteer did to him either, surgical-wise, once he got him to the far side of the lot.
Coat and Shabby stitched what was left of my fingers and did a pretty good job of it if I do say so myself. I must have been in that weird little private ER for two days. They transferred me to a chic Old World clinic, an upgrade from the other place to be sure. When I got my wits back, I discovered it was the Drake — that’s high-end hotel living for ya. The puncture seemed to take care of itself. The main concern was my hand, because bone infection is never a good thing.
I was there a couple of weeks. It was Christmastime. I had a 24-hour nurse. Every few days, a huge Samoan looked in on me. No way you couldn’t feel safe around that man. All of the people around Kura had heart. I knew they’d take a bullet for him, and probably had — or worse. My minder never spoke, which made me feel like an utter fool. Five-hundred pounds, with a Cheshire grin. I had the feeling he was close to Kura, and when in his presence I made sure I behaved. I even acted repentant, though for what I wasn’t sure.
All I did in my perfect, stately cocoon was eat club sandwiches and listen to The White Album. Lots of room-service hot fudge sundaes, lots of doodling and drawing, lots of journaling about my White (Mocha) Knight. I had become fairly obsessed. Because after all, I’d seen him just twice — once, when he stripped off his shirt to stop the bleeding and the other while being patched up by Coat and Shabby, which was kind of a dreamy corollary of the former, with more dope and less blood — so his messianic absence made a perfect breeding ground for my hormonal, father-starved, junkie-Rapunzel imagination to run wild. In my head, my mysterious savior was pure Thanatos, with a heavy dollop of Eros on top.
So there she was, Eloise with a social disease (gonorrhea, and cured, courtesy of Coat and Shabby). Fidgety, depressed, and packin’ on the pounds… feeling deserted by all her witchy-woman powers. Like a doomed prisoner, awaiting reprieve — I still held out hope that he’d gallop up and swoop me onto his saddle. And now I remember one of the things that tortured me. They never bothered to station a guard at the door of the suite to prevent my escape, at least I never saw one. I didn’t know which freaked me out more: that I could leave anytime I wanted, or if other people could enter. What if my ex’s posse was hunting me down? (Not that anyone gave enough of a shit about my ex to avenge him — not to mention they would already have ascertained they were brutally outmatched.) In my worst moments, it boiled down to Kura not caring less. But now I know exactly why they—he—Kura — didn’t feel the need. Because it had to have been so obvious I wasn’t going anywhere, not as long as there was the slimmest chance of a rendezvous with the Big Boss. That was plain as the stumps on my hand… O, they must really have gotten a kick out of stringing me along! No, by the time I left, I was convinced I would just have to leave it all behind: my savior, the Samoan, the Norwegian nurse, the room service — ooh, that was going to hurt! — goodbye to all that. Everything but the mason jar of Darvons that Coat and Shabby had prescribed, to wean me from the heroin.
On the morning I left, I had all sorts of conflicting emotions. I was in way over my head but what else was new? I was weak and angry and weepy and paranoid. For a while, I thought Kura worked for my father! The Samoan probably disabused me of that notion somewhere along the line. But I couldn’t piece together why—how—Kura had been there to save me nor could I understand why I was being looked after—cared for — with such painstaking, tender deliberation. At check-out time, the futility of my serious convalescence crush, the intensity of yearning for my patron came home to roost. I longed for him in every fiber of my broken being. Estrogen and Electra coursed through my veins like lava. I fantasized us having a life together — preposterous. The greater my yearning, the more crazy-insecure I became. (I suppose I haven’t changed too much.) I decided to make an “overture” but was paralyzed by anxiety. What if I was rejected? Laughed at and humiliated? Another problem was — and there were moments when I flattered myself by thinking it was the only problem — that I was sure he knew by now that I was underage.