“What. .?”
I sat up, water splashing on the floor and on my clothes. I heard the refrigerator pop open, then tenebrous voices. I pulled the plug and gathered a towel around me but when I opened the door, I was startled by the blurry blackness of the living room. I heard rustling from the futon, conspiratorial giggling, and Brian Eno’s anxious meowing outside the unexpectedly closed window. To my amazement, Kimberle had brought somebody home. I didn’t especially like the idea of her having sex in my living room but we hadn’t talked about it — I’d assumed, since she was supposedly suicidal, that there wasn’t a need for that talk. Now I was trapped, naked and wet, watching Kimberle hovering above her lover, as agile as the real Alfredo Codona on the high wire.
Outside, Brian Eno wailed, tapping her paws on the glass. I shrugged, as if she could understand, but all she did was unleash an even more high-pitched scream. It was raining outside. I held tight to the towel and started across the room as quietly as I could. But as I tried to open the window, I felt a hand on my ankle. Its warmth rose up my leg, infused my gut and became a knot in my throat. I looked down and saw Kimberle’s arm, its jagged tattoos pulsing. Rather than jerk away, I bent to undo her fingers, only to find myself face to face with her. Her lips were glistening, and below her chin was a milky slope with a puckered nipple. . she moved to make room for me as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know how or why but my mouth opened to the stranger’s breast, tasting her and the vague tobacco of Kimberle’s spit.
Afterwards, as Kimberle and I sprawled on either side of the girl, I recognized her as a clerk from a bookstore in town. She seemed dazed and pleased, her shoulder up against Kimberle as she stroked my belly. I realized that for the last hour or so, as engaged as we’d been in this most intimate of manoeuvres, Kimberle and I had not kissed or otherwise touched. We had worked side by side, a hyaloid membrane — structureless and free.
“Here, banana boat queen,” Kimberle said with a sly grin as she passed me a joint. Banana boat queen? And I thought: Where the fuck did she get that? How the hell did she think she’d earned dispensation for that?
The girl between us bristled.
Then Kimberle laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said to our guest, “I can do that; she and I go back.”
In all honesty, I don’t know when I met Kimberle. It seemed she had always been there, from the very day we arrived from Cuba. Hers was a mysterious and solitary world. I realized that one winter day in my junior year, as I was walking home from school just as dusk was settling in. Kimberle pulled her Toyota next to me and asked if I wanted a ride. As soon as I got in, she offered me a cigarette. I said no.
“A disgusting habit anyway. You wanna see something?”
“What?”
Without another word, Kimberle aimed the Toyota out of town, past the last deadbeat bar, the strip malls and the trailer parks, past the ramp to the interstate, until she entered a narrow gravel road with corn blossoming on either side. There was a brackish smell, the tang of wet dirt and nicotine. The Toyota danced on the gravel but Kimberle, bent over the wheel, maintained a determined expression.
“Are you ready?”
“Ready. .? For what?” I asked, my fingers clutching the shoulder belt.
“This,” she whispered. Then she turned off the headlights.
Before I had a chance to adjust to the tracers, she gunned the car, hurling it down the black tunnel, the tyres spitting rocks as she swirled this way and that, following the eerie spotlight provided by the moon. . for a moment, we were suspended in air and time. My life did not pass in front of my eyes how I might have expected; instead, I saw images of desperate people on a bounding sea; multitudes wandering Fifth Avenue or the Thames, the shores of the Bosporus or the sands outside the pyramids; mirrors and mirrors, mercury and water; a family portrait in Havana from years before; my mother with her tangled hair, my father tilting his hat in New Orleans or Galveston; the shadows of birds of paradise against a stucco wall; a shallow and watery grave, then another longer passage, a trail of bones. Just then the silver etched the sharp edges of the corn stalks, teasing them to life as spectres in black coats. .
“We’re going to die!” I screamed.
Moments later, the Toyota came to a shaky stop as we both gasped for breath. A cloud of smoke surrounded us, reeking of fermentation and gasoline. I popped open the door and crawled outside, where I promptly threw up.
Kimberle scrambled over the seat and out, practically on top of me. Her arms held me steady. “You OK?” she asked, panting.
“That was amazing,” I said, my heart still racing, “just amazing.”
Not even a week had gone by when Kimberle brought another girl home, this time an Eastern European professor who’d been implicated with a Cuban during a semester abroad in Bucharest. Rather than wait for me to stumble on to them, they had marched right in to my bedroom, naked as newborns. I was going to protest but was too unnerved by their boldness and then, in my weakness, seduced by the silky warmth of skin on either side of me. Seconds later, I felt something hard and cold against my belly and looked down to see Kimberle wearing a harness with a summer sausage dangling from it. The professor sighed as I guided the meat. As she licked and bit at my chin, Kimberle pushed inch by sitophilic inch into her. At one point, Kimberle was balanced above me, her mouth grazing mine, but we just stared past each other.
Afterwards — the professor between us — we luxuriated, the room redolent of garlic, pepper and sweat. “Quite the little Cuban sandwich we’ve got here,” Kimberle said, passing me what now seemed like the obligatory after-sex joint followed by the vaguely racist comment. The professor stiffened. Like the bookstore girl, she’d turned her back to Kimberle. Instead of rubbing my belly, this one settled her head on my shoulder, then fell happily asleep.
“Kimberle, you’ve gotta stop,” I said. I hesitated. “I’ve gotta get my books back. Do you understand me?”
Her head was buried under the pillow on the futon, the early morning light shiny on her exposed shoulder blade. With the white sheet crumbled halfway up her back, she looked like a headless angel.
“Kimberle, are you listening to me?” There was some imperceptible movement, a twitch. “Would you please. . I’m talking to you.”
She emerged, curtain of yellow hair, eyes smoky. “What makes you think I took them?”
“What. .? Are you kidding me?”
“Coulda been the bookstore girl, or the professor.”
Since the menage, the bookstore girl had called to invite me to dinner but I had declined. And the professor had stopped by twice, once with a first edition of Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio. Tempting — achingly tempting — as that 1930 oddity was, I had refused it.
“I’ll let Kimberle know you stopped by,” I’d added, biting my lip.
“I didn’t come to see Kimberle,” the professor had said, her fingers pulling on my curls, which I’d found disconcerting.
Kimberle was looking at me now, waiting for an answer. “My books were missing before the bookstore girl and the professor,” I said.
“Oh.”
“We’ve got to talk about that too.”
Down went her head. “Now?” she asked her voice distant and flimsy like a final communication from a sinking ship.
“Now.”
She hopped up, her hip bones pure cartilage. She shivered. “I’ll be right back,” she said, headed for the bathroom. I dropped on the futon, heard her pee into the bowl, then the water running. I scanned the shelf, imagining where Mental Radio might have fit. Silence.
Then: “Kimberle? Kimberle, you all right?” I scrambled to the bathroom, struggled with the knob. “Kimberle, please, let me in,” I pleaded, imagining her hanging from the light fixture, her veins cascading red into the tub, that polymer pistol bought just for this moment, when she’d stick its tip in her mouth and. . “Kimberle, goddamn it. .” Then I kicked, kicked and kicked again, until the lock bent and the door gave. “Kimberle. .” But there was nothing, just my breath misting as I stared at the open window, the screen leaning against the tub.