Pretend I'm Dead Read online

  “Hai-ti,” Sheila said. “There’s no s on the end.”

  “Hades is the underworld, Sheila. From Greek mythology? It’s another term for hell. Haiti, on the other hand, is a country.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and shrugged. “My correcting you is a sign of respect.”

  “You respect me?” Sheila asked, surprised. “As a person?”

  “No, as a pigeon.”

  “Remember that first day, when I picked you up from the airport and you asked me if I masturbated?”

  Mona rolled her eyes and bit into a crab rangoon.

  “You were only twelve. That’s when I knew you were special,” Sheila said. “What’s that word? Begins with a p.”

  “Precocious.”

  Sheila snapped her fingers. “Right.”

  “These crab rangoons are precocious,” Mona said, chewing. “You should eat one.”

  Sheila cleared her throat. “You know, when I decided to sell the business and retire, my first thought was that I needed you to come with me. I even looked into colleges for you down there. But you’re almost twenty-four now. I shouldn’t be trying to caretake you. My sponsor says it’s instinctive, deeply ingrained behavior, a result of my overattachment to you, and that I’m in danger of preventing you from taking the falls necessary for your personal growth.”

  “More falls?” She coughed. “That’s what I need?”

  “What you need is for me to let you make your own decisions and mistakes. Our relationship is very co- and always has been.”

  “Co-” was Sheila’s shorthand for “codependent.”

  “Yeah, well, your lunch is getting co-,” Mona said.

  “I’m not very hungry, for some reason.”

  “Why didn’t you just give the business to me?”

  “Because then you’d stay in Lowell forever,” Sheila said. “Which would depress the fuck out of me. And I can’t just give it to you—I need the money, silly.”

  The buyer was some chick named Judy, who owned another cleaning business in Andover.

  “So presumably I start working for this Judy person next week?”

  “You won’t even notice. Your schedule will be the same, and she’ll cut you a check every two weeks.”

  “Fuck,” Mona said. “So I have to start paying taxes.”

  “That’s the only difference.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty big difference.”

  “I think it’s a good thing,” Sheila said. “Maybe now you’ll realize you need to do something else for a living.”

  Mona felt a twinge near the bottom of her spine. The pain shot down to her toes, which, as usual, were partially numb. If she made any sudden movements, her back would go out completely. This would include coughing or sneezing. Even whistling would be dangerous. But crying—crying would be worst of all.

  “Who’s going to be my emergency contact? Who will I not celebrate the holidays with?”

  “You’ll meet someone,” Sheila assured her. “Trust me. He’s going to sweep you off your feet and you’ll forget all about me. Just promise me you’ll stay in school.”

  * * *

  SHE WAITED THREE DAYS BEFORE dialing his number. It rang five times and then his machine picked up. “Leave a message or not, I don’t give a—” The beep came sooner than expected.

  “Uhh, I’m calling you.” Before hanging up, she added lamely, “It’s Saturday.” Realizing she forgot to leave her name and number, she waited a minute and tried again.

  This time he answered on the first ring. “I was worried you wouldn’t call back,” he said, winded. “I forgot to change my voicemail recording.”

  “It’s a little intimidating,” she admitted. “I got flustered and forgot to say my name. How’d you know it was me?”

  “You have this weird nonaccent,” he said.

  “I’m from Los Angeles,” she explained. “Originally, I mean.”

  “You must be homesick.”

  “Nah,” she said. “Lowell’s gotten under my skin. I don’t think I could live without all this brick and repression.”

  He asked why here, of all places.

  “Oh, I was shipped here,” she said. “When I was twelve. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “Must have been quite a shock, landing in this dump. You’re probably still recovering.”

  “It took some getting used to,” she admitted. “There’s stuff here I’d never been exposed to in L.A.”

  “Such as?”

  “Snow, wool, guilt.”

  He laughed. “You’re probably saving your pennies to get out of here.”

  “I’m not a saver,” she said. “And I have zero ambition.”

  There was a silence.

  “What do you say we get together tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Where?”

  “My place,” he said. “I want to get that out of the way—my living situation, I mean. Besides, it’ll be good for you to see how the other half lives.” He waited a beat. “You’ll probably run away, screaming.”

  “Do you live in a commune or something?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Projects?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’ve seen projects before.”

  “It’s worse than that,” he said.

  “You live in a Dumpster,” she said. “Which is fine. I’ve been in Dumpsters before.”

  He snorted. “Just remember to bring your ID,” he said. “They won’t let you into the building without it.”

  “So it’s like a nightclub, then,” she said.

  * * *

  HE LIVED DOWNTOWN, IN A residential hotel called the Hawthorne, a six-story brick building sandwiched between a dry-cleaning plant and a Cambodian restaurant. When she arrived, three Cambodian gang members were loitering in front of the restaurant. It was broad daylight and she felt overdressed in her black kimono shirt and slacks. She also felt whiter and richer than she was. The sixty bucks in her pocket felt like six hundred.

  The lobby had the charm of a check-cashing kiosk. A security guard stood at the door and a pasty fat man sat in a booth behind thick, wavy bulletproof glass. Mona slipped her ID through the slot.

  “Who you here to see?”

  She gave him Mr. Disgusting’s name.

  “Really?” he asked, looking her up and down.

  “Yeah, really,” she answered.

  Mr. Disgusting came down a few minutes later, wearing gray postal-worker pants and a green T-shirt that said “Lowell Sucks.”

  “You look nice,” she said.

  “I scraped my face for you.” He took her hand and brought it to his bare cheek and then clumsily kissed the tip of her thumb. She blushed, glanced at the fat man behind the desk, who studied them with open disgust. “You get your ID back when you leave the building,” he said into his microphone.

  They shared the elevator with a couple of crackheads she recognized from the neighborhood. Mr. Disgusting kept beaming at her as if he’d just won the lottery. For the first time in years, she felt beautiful, like a real prize. They got off on the third floor.

  “It’s quiet right now, but this place is a total nuthouse,” he said.

  “Doesn’t seem so bad,” she lied.

  “Wait until dark,” he said, pulling out his keys.

  His room smelled like coffee, cough drops, and Old Spice. All she saw was dirt at first, one of the main hazards of her occupation. She spotted grime on the windowsill and blinds, dust on the television screen, a streaked mirror over a yellowed porcelain sink. The fake Oriental rug needed vacuuming, along with the green corduroy easy chair he directed her to sit in.

  Once seated, she switched off her dirt radar and took in the rest of the room. She’d expected something bare and cell-like, but the room was large, warm, and carefully decorated. He had good taste in lamps. Real paintings rather than prints hung on the walls; an Indian textile covered the double bed. He owned a cappuccino mac
hine, an antique typewriter, a sturdy wooden desk, and a couple of bookcases filled with mostly existential and Russian novels, some textbooks, and what looked like an extensive collection of foreign dictionaries.

  “Are you a linguist or something?” she asked.

  “No, I just like dictionaries.” He sat directly across from her, on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs. “I find them comforting, I guess. Most of these I found on the street.”

  “You mean in the trash?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a slut for garbage.”

  “Your vocabulary must be pretty impressive,” she said. “Do you have a favorite word?”

  He thought about it for a second. “I’ve always liked the word ‘cleave’ because it has two opposite meanings: to split or divide and to adhere or cling. Those two tendencies have been operating in me simultaneously for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can feel a battle raging right now.” He clutched his stomach theatrically.

  She smiled. It was rare for her to find someone attractive physically and also to like what came out of their mouth.

  “What’s your least favorite word?” he asked.

  “ ‘Mucous,’ ” she said.

  He nodded and scratched his chin.

  “I wasn’t born like this,” he said suddenly. “Moving into this hellhole did quite a number on me—you know, spiritually or whatever. I haven’t felt like myself in a long time.”

  He’d lived there seven years. Before that, he owned a house in Lower Belvidere, near that guns and ammo joint. He’d had it all: a garage, a couple of cats, houseplants. She asked what happened.

  “I was living in New York, trying to make it as an artist,” he said. “I had a couple shows, sold a few paintings, was on my way up. During the day I worked as a roofer in Queens.” He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair. “One night I was on my way home from a bar and I was shit-faced, literally stumbling down the sidewalk, and out of nowhere, two entire stories of scaffolding collapsed on top of me, pinning me to the concrete. A delivery guy found me three hours later. Broke my clavicle, left arm, four ribs, both my legs. Bruised my spleen. My fucking teeth were toast.

  “After I got out of the hospital, I couldn’t exactly lump shingles as a roofer, so I crawled back to Lowell. Then I got this big settlement and was able to buy a run-down house, but one thing led to the other.” He pointed to his arm. “I pissed it away, made some bad decisions. I’ve been living in a state of slow panic ever since.”

  “Sounds like you’re lucky to be alive.”

  He shrugged. “Am I?”

  She felt her scalp tingle. For as long as she could remember, she’d had a death wish, which she pictured as a rope permanently tied around her ankle. The rope was often slack and inanimate, trailing along behind her or sitting in a loose pile at her feet, but occasionally it came alive with its own single-minded purpose, coiling itself tightly around her torso or neck, or tethering her to something dangerous, like a bridge or a moving vehicle.

  Mr. Disgusting plucked a German pocket dictionary off the shelf and leafed through it. He was certainly a far cry from the last guy she dated, some edgeless dude from the next town over whose bookshelves had been lined with CliffsNotes and whose heaviest cross to bear had been teenage acne.

  “Do you know any German words, Mona?” he asked, startling her. It was only the second time he’d said her name.

  “Only one,” she said. “But I don’t know how to pronounce it.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “World-weariness.”

  “Ah, Weltschmerz,” he said, smiling. “You have that word written all over you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He was beaming at her again. Where had he come from? He was too open and unguarded to be a native New Englander. She asked him where he was born.

  “Germany,” he said.

  According to his adoption papers, his birth mother was a French teenage prostitute living in Berlin. An elderly American couple adopted him as a toddler and brought him to their dairy farm in New Hampshire.

  “They would’ve been better off adopting a donkey,” he said. “My mother was a drunk and my father danced on my head every other day.”

  He ran away with the circus when he was seventeen. Got a job shoveling animal shit and worked his way up to drug procurer. It wasn’t your ordinary circus, though. It had all the usual circusy stuff, but everyone was gay: the owner, all the performers and clowns, the entire crew. Even the elephants were gay.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “Straight as an arrow,” he said. After a short silence he asked, “Why, are you?”

  She made a so-so motion with her hand.

  “Wishy-washy,” he said. “You really are from L.A.”

  She laughed.

  “Well, I’m glad we got our sexual orientation cleared up,” he said. “Listen, there’s something else I need to get out of the way. Our future together depends on your reaction to this.” He smiled nervously.

  “Fire away.”

  She was 90 percent certain he was about to tell her he was positive.

  But he didn’t say anything, just continued smiling at her, his upper lip twitching with the effort. She smiled back.

  “What is this—a smiling contest?” she asked.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “You win,” she said.

  “Take a good look,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m looking. I don’t see anything.”

  He walked over to the sink and filled a glass with water, and then he removed his teeth and dropped them into the glass.

  “I’ve read Plato, Euripides, and Socrates, but nothing could have prepared me for the Teeth Police,” he said.

  He held up the glass. The teeth had settled into an uneven and disquieting smile. She felt a sudden rawness in her throat, as if she’d been screaming all night.

  “They’re grotesque—don’t think I’m not aware of that. I call the top set the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Notice the massive dome and flying buttresses.”

  She smiled. The lump in her throat had shrunk, allowing her to swallow.

  “What I really need to do is have the roof cut out of the damn thing. There’s this weird suction thing going on whenever I wear it.”

  “It cleaves to the roof of your mouth,” she managed, and held her hand up for a high five.

  “Precisely,” he said, slapping her hand. “Very uncomfortable.”

  He set the glass on the sink and sat on the bed again, gazing distractedly out the window. She realized he was giving her a chance to study his face. He looked better without the teeth—more relaxed, more like himself somehow.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve never seen false teeth before.”

  “Yeah, but have you been in love with someone who has them?”

  She felt her eyes widen involuntarily. “Who says we’re in love?”

  “I do,” he said.

  For the first time since setting foot in the building, she felt a twinge of fear. She imagined him throwing her onto the bed, gagging her with one of his socks.

  “I’m kidding,” he said.

  “How old are you?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Forty-four,” he said.

  “I might be too young for you,” she said. “I’m only twenty-three.”

  “That isn’t too young for me,” he said seriously.

  “Of course it isn’t,” she said, and laughed. “What I’m trying to say is that you might be too old for me.”

  He frowned. “I had a feeling the dentures would be a deal breaker.”

  “It’s not that,” she said quickly. Or was it? She imagined him sucking on her nipples like a newborn, and then waited for a wave of repulsion to wash over her. Instead, she felt oddly pacified and comforted by the image, as if she were the one being breast-fed. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  He made Mexican hot chocolate with a shot of espresso. They sat side by side on his bed, sippin
g in silence. She noticed a notebook lying on the bed and resisted the urge to pick it up. He saw her looking at it. “That’s the notebook I write snatches of poetry and ridiculous ideas in,” he said.

  “Good to know.”

  “Do you have anything embarrassing you want to show me? A bad tattoo, perhaps?”

  “My parents gave me away to a practical stranger, so my fear of abandonment feels sort of like a tattoo,” she said. “On my brain.”

  He smiled. “You visit them?”

  “Dad, never. Mom, rarely.”

  Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was ‘phobophobia,’ a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.

  “My parents are addicts,” she said, and yawned. “But I shouldn’t talk—I’ve been on my share of drugs. Psychiatric.”

  “Antipsychotics?”

  She laughed. “Antidepressants.”

  “No shame in that,” he said. “I’m on 400 grams of Mellaril. My doctor said I could develop something called rabbit syndrome, which is involuntary movements of the mouth.” He twitched his mouth like a rabbit, and she laughed.

  “What’re you taking it for?” she asked.

  “Opiate withdrawal,” he said. “But they usually give it to schizophrenics.”

  She nodded, unsure of what to say. He grinned at her and suddenly lifted his T-shirt with both hands. On his chest, a large, intricate, black-and-gray tattoo of an old-fashioned wooden ship with five windblown sails. The Mayflower, maybe, minus the crew. Above the ship, under his collarbone, a banner read “Homeward Bound” in Gothic script.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “One of the many useless things I purchased with my insurance money,” he said.

  “Well, this is kind of embarrassing,” she said, “but I have some pretty big muscles. My biceps and calves are totally jacked. When I wear a dress—which is never—I look and feel like a drag queen.”