Malika's still on the floor lookin' like a sack of potatoes somebody carelessly tossed there on the cushions she's got piled up around her thin fine body, secondhand wealth made outta nice gold and silver embroidery snaking arabesques through thick crushed red velvet.
She's in panties and a white tee-shirt again, legs splayed lazy, toenails jagged rows of half-busted red polish. The shirt is dark a little at the collar and underarms. The balcony door's open and admits the day without mercy.
The sun is a torch and the wind is fire with a hurricane behind it. She's languishing, panting like a dog, sucking on a longneck already warming in about thirty seconds. My own is mostly empty, damp gone tepid between my palm and the glass.
There is no conscience in the wind. Snatches of dust and desolation, Malika's cheap perfume, the way she's picked up a breath of something pricier from one of her clients. There's a muzzy self-satisfaction decorating her pretty face.
She's high bones softened with a touch of whatever babyfat youth has kept in the face of her habit and the life that's made her
what she is. Milky scars ladder her skinny arms, insubstantial with about as much meat as steamed spinach, crease the crabbed black rumors of track lines. I've seen her shoot up a few times; watched the way she staggers back at one, two, three in the morning, a little too far from her jones, eyes big and haunted and clattering around in a kitchen drawer next to the knives and finding the little baggy.
A whisper of powder on a spoon. Her works unzipped, cracked old brown leather, a sound of dread and longing in the night. A lighter's snap sears the black with gold and red like dying leaves. I watch the process and say nothing because there is nothing to say, lying there with eyes slitted in the gloom
it is an easy fiction I am asleep
we both know it is a lie.
Sometimes it is easy for her. The needle is a fast jab and the world climbs back on its axis. Red feathers yellowish junk, cheap shit from some street corner hustler or one of her rolls. There is no joy but only rightness melting the tight expectation in her face like desert ice under a sunrise.
An injection of liquid death is bell-ringing bliss deeper and fuller than any full-body orgasm when she really gets enough to go on the nod, to get better than just fixed. A creaky blue rubber tourniquet gives up its hug around her scrawny biceps and she sinks back on a pillow.
The smile is idiocy like all junkies, an imbecilic slyness, the certainty she now commands the world because her feet are back solidly on the earth.
But unlike most junkies her lusts aren't atrophied. That's when she's hungriest even if she's learned I'm not a meal. She'll still show off, still weave and wobble, standing in a whirlwind of music she'll crank up, Arabic pop with that sharp grind I know from the radio in the City of Jasmine and to her only is a faraway daydream of a place she's never known.
She's nimble on bare feet, pivots, swings round hips.
When it's an especially bad client I know I will see a story in one act stripe her dark skin, palms on negative, fingerprints made plum on her body, all the old horrors known ten thousand times in an hour. She retreats from them by attacking.
Attacking me with ravenous stares.
Soft little pleas.
C'mon. Y'can make an exception fer little ol' me, right?
When I say and do nothing except give her a flat grunt, she shows she does not want to believe in shame, panties dangling around one ankle, sitting pointed on a chair and showing me that darkness at the apex of her thighs, staring at me with those eyes turned shallow and glassy.
Now she stares up at me with eyes glazed from the other six beers roosting beside her.
"I take it you're not Muslim." The day is inferno's unsteady waltz.
Voices wobble from somewhere far below the apartment. The world is a place of dryness and pain and desolation. This is not a beautiful place.
Its people do not belong.
They are not even real, some of them. Their flesh exists and the spirit, also, but the name
the legality of the thing
they do not cut paper in the shape of the gash of stale body odor and shuffling prints in the stagnant dust. They are fictions belonging to collective hallucination, beings of night and shadow and fog.
Malika's grin belongs on a Cheshire Cat.
"Y'all think everything else I do Allah likes?"
"I figure if judgment came after every crime there wouldn't be any of us left."
She just sucks back the last of a longneck.
I know what's coming.
"My friends wantsta meetcha."
I do not know what is coming.
"Huh?"
"You know." I do know.
I've been waiting for ten days now.
Every day, the same bullshit.
Every day, the same evasion.
Every day, the same. Sisyphus had a less predictable life.
Every day, the same trudge in the city. The same forlorn eyes. Same arrogant bulldogs in cute little pig costumes.
Same fangs dripping venom.
Same stares from the brown and wretched so bitter if you tasted their tears you would keel over and die.
There is no life in this place. It is impossible to breathe in the wards without hope ruled by a race without mercy.
"You're serious?"
"Uh-huh."
"But there's a catch." There's always a fuckin' catch. "Listen, it's sleazy if you wanna make me fuck you-"
"Oh, yeah, that's real great for a girl's self-esteem." Malika just tips back the last of her beer. "Get me another bottle."
"You got a real good strong constitution for a chick your size."
"Mom was an alcoholic."
The fridge clinks. The mist is cool wet cotton on my forehead curdling in the powdery air before I yank out one for her.
One beer's enough for me. It might be cold on the tongue the first time but any longer and you start to remember shit tastes the same coming in as going out.
A palm twisted on the bottle cap.
Practiced movement.
Carbonation's hiss.
But I still can't help myself. Can't help giving her a little gift, lips wrapped around the bottle's mouth, a slow deliberate pull.
She stares.
There's a flat hunger in her eyes
stupid
animal
naked lust dangling out of the dark.
"You keep doin' that, and maybe I'll show you ain't only wolves have the strength."
"Try it. First woman I fell for beat the shit outta me every day."
"Wow, mommy issues, huh?"
"Sounds like a confession." She laughs.
I do.
There is no real happiness in the sound. Instead she swings herself up, weaving and half-delirious from the poison frothing in her veins, yanks it out of my hand.
Contact is in a place looks like a shithole even by shithole norms. It's a dingy neighborhood, one of those places at the edges of the feel-good extravagance the rich need to get it up, all glass and metal and elaborate stonework and skinny Gothic windows.
I can taste it in the furnace air robs the breath from your lungs when you step out under a sun turning the sky to white lead.
There's pain here.
It bleeds off the dingy storefronts whose dark windows dust dulls like the street kids' sad eyes.
Place's name is Soft Delights.
Old Tiresias could've clocked the place from the smell alone. There's a humus slap of stale happy endings under the cramped dark ceilings and fake-dignified hardwood wallowing under brassy light coming off cheap fixtures. All of it tries without trying enough to hide the fraying edges, no different than the black-eyed chick behind a weatherbeaten wooden desk with enough tits for two women looking like a marshmallow fountain packed in a too-low pink top.
She's got some chub on her face but it's flattering enough. I still can see the speed-freak twitch in the eyes, the way the foundation hides the liver disease, the way there are unsteady jags in the kohl lining out the gray puddles never quite meet my stare. They look like week-old dishwater, anemic and barely-there.
Her nails are too-long, blue manicure chipped at the corners.
Broad's skin is pale. I make her in a second for a pointy-tooth. Something about the way she carries her body, too arrogant for a chick probably turns tricks in the back rooms.
All she's got on the desk's sticky-looking veneer is a bulky old phone looking like bakelite color of fresh bruises has seen better centuries, an antique if anybody'd be willing to touch the thing once it left this place.
The clients are neatly divided between regulars too shameless to hide their faces except just to stare with lazy nonchalance at the screens they hold in front of their eyes and the twitchy first-timers not knowing what to expect who fidget around on a creaky set of mismatched Naugahyde chairs whose fake wood is barely useful for kindling.
There's a blaze of liquid courage coming off some of 'em. Some make it clear this is the month's entertainment eaten out of somebody else's dignity, workmen's clothes shedding dirt and old sweat, rough-edged boots and bad nails and bad teeth and bad complexions.
Others wear suits too nice for a hole like this.
The floor clunks and creaks under my combat boots. The receptionist gives me a once-, twice-, thrice-over.
"Y'ever been here before?" Her voice says tobacco is key to a balanced breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
"I'm here to meet an old friend."
"We're all old friends here." Shit.
The eyes sharpen just a little
fast enough I barely catch it
but it's there.
"Ludmilla."
"Ludmilla don't work here no more."
"Gave me a bum steer. You know where she is?"
"Her sister still does. She would. Who should I tell 'er's askin'?"
"Juanita Gama."
"Gimme a sec."
I taste the eyes on my shoulders.
My ass.
Receptionist snatches up the receiver, slaps well-rehearsed numbers. Her nails still clack a litle on the keys.
"She'll see ya now. She got an openin'."
"Hey. I been waitin' here fer fitty minutes." One of the workmen speaks up, gives off some flammable breath with a sound like a backed-up toilet.
"I made an appointment." Guy backs down when I turn. "That okay with you, champ?"
"Y-yeah." He might have fangs but there's a fat untested meekness in the eyes.
This place might have sand but he ain't walked the desert.
The door opens.
Down a hallway past the dripping stain of regret and reticence numbed by necessity, all chintzy wood paneling, bad lights like the kind of place made to hide last-call specials at the worst dive in town.
A half-dead orchid sags in a glass of dirty water resting on a decrepit old wooden table with rat-chewed legs.
It's at the corridor's end.
There's somebody else in the hallway disappearing into a room. Something off about the guy; the uneasy way he glides, trying too hard to look inconspicuous, fae and delicate, hair striped silver like skunk. He gives off a stink.
Cop.
But not security.
There's no meanness there.
At the hall's end she's waiting. She could be the receptionist's twin for all the ways they look nothing alike, thin and pretty and young, big pink-shaded black eyes and delicate bones and full fuchsia-polished lips, consumptive and long and fine poured into an oriental-looking robe speckled with fireworks of poppy floral print and badly-aimed cum against the black.
The hair's pin-straight, brushes her shoulders, bright black under the dim lights. She has one leg thrown over the other, shows a glint of dark skin and more discrete track marks on the calf.
A tattoo, too, half a fish over an ankle. Nobody'd know without looking.
"You know Cousin Jane?"
"Lacey."
"Okay." She gives me a nod. "Got the money?"
All comes down to mal in the end.
