“Didn’t you know the guy who disappeared?” Verona asked. “Nathan?”
The highway lines zipped by as she drove. This was the first question she had asked me since finding me curled up on her kitchen floor. It put her in a weird mood, seeing me like that. Or maybe she had been in a weird mood even before. I couldn’t tell. A dead cat appeared on the side of the road—framed in the side-view as we drove away from it. Its pink guts were ground into the asphalt like an eraser. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
“No,” I answered, biting at the scar on my lip. The one Nathan had given me. “Not really.”
Verona side-eyed me from the rear-view. I pretended not to notice and fingered the nazar in my pocket.
“Well, Stacy knew him,” Verona continued. “She said it was because they went to the same parties, but he was definitely her dealer.”
I didn’t know who Stacy was. The afternoon sun bounced off office windows as we drove past. Floor to ceiling. I traced their outline with my finger against the passenger’s window, and Verona’s eyes squinted at me in the rear-view. “Anyway,” she continued. “Stacy also said he looked like a ghost, last she saw him. Kept looking over his shoulder, wasn’t paying attention to a word she said. She thinks someone was after him.”
My reflection against the glass buildings squeezed and shrunk as we turned a corner. There were no birds in the sky, not even a cloud. What did Nathan do?
“Kurt,” Verona’s voice shook. “I know you guys ‘worked’ together, or whatever.” She took a long breath in. “Is there something I should be worried about?”
Sunlight crept over my bare arm, sweating me out like an ant, and Amity’s voice echoed in my memory. Promise you won’t tell Nathan? I waved away the thought, grabbing Verona’s free hand. “No. Absolutely not,” I said. She kept her fingers closed tight before eventually letting me in.
Verona’s hair flowed like lava as we walked towards the mall beneath the sun. She had reminded me that the art show was tonight and that I needed something to wear. A row of finely dressed mannequins watched us walk inside.
She took my hand, without hesitation this time. “I think it’s this way.” She started to lead me through a maze of escalators and bodegas. “Actually, no,” she said, stopping in her tracks. “This way.”
Nothing looked familiar. I couldn’t remember the last time I was here. Most of the shops had cotton spider webs stretched across their window displays. It was almost Halloween. I didn’t even realize it was October, it was still so hot. We walked into a shop guarded by a plastic skeleton holding a sign that said Smile! You’re on camera.
Rows of suits and blazers hung against the wall of the store. Verona riffled through the display while I pretended to be distracted by the model photos hung up in the store. They were all in black and white, held inside huge fancy frames. Too fancy for an outlet clothing store. It was like a museum. A man in tight boxers held up a bottle of perfume in one, and large, block letters filled the frame below him. Desire. Danger. Beauty.
“Here,” Verona held out a blazer and a button-up in front of my face. “These were the smallest sizes I could find.”
The lights in the changing room were bright and fluorescent, and one of them wouldn’t stop buzzing. I bit at the scar on my lip as I buttoned up the new shirt. Long, pink swirls stretched across the material in some sort of floral pattern. Daisies? Lilies? I left the top few buttons undone and pulled the blazer on. It was a little loose.
The overhead light kept buzzing like an angry fly, and the long sharp shadows it cast made me dizzy. I pressed my forehead to the mirror. The fog from my breath erased my face, but the rest of me was still there—the flowers on my shirt swirling in and out. I tried closing my eyes, but it didn’t help. I was still there. The pink spirals wrapped around my chest and stomach, hugging me tighter and tighter. I gasped for a shot of air, but the cords were too tight, and white stars cut through my black vision. I grasped at my shirt, trying to pull it off, but it was cutting into my skin now, squeezing the blood from me.
Verona knocked at the door, and the scene reverted. I inhaled a deep breath and searched my pockets for any loose Xanax.
“Well, how do you look?” her voice rang from the other side.
Jade and Verona stood near the end of the bar while I waited for the drinks. “Excuse me for saying this, but he looks fine as hell,” Jade remarked. He was leaning into Verona’s ear but the hotel’s ballroom was big enough to hear the echo of their conversation. It was big enough to hear the echo of everyone’s conversations.
The bartender handed me my drinks. “Enjoy the show,” he said. I nodded and walked back towards Verona and Jade, ice thumping in the plastic cups. How long were we going to be here?
Before I could pass off the drinks, Jade interrupted. “I think I just saw Gérard Ponce,” he grabbed Verona’s arm, looking intently through the crowd.
“No you did not!” She stood on her toes, peering over the sea of people.
I didn’t know who Gérard Ponce was. The piece of art hung next to us wasn’t a painting. It was a mosaic of printed photographs, zoomed in snapshots of the human body. There was an eye with broken blood vessels, and an armpit dripping beads of sweat. What was I doing here? At the center of the mosaic was a hairy nipple.
“No really, look.” Jade pointed a long manicured finger between a group of heads. Unintelligible conversations bounced off the high ceiling. It was like a room full of grasshoppers in dresses and tuxedos. On the other side, stood some old balding man with glasses. The rest of the hair that he did have left was oiled back.
“No way,” Verona said, craning her neck. “You might be right.”
I continued to stand there, both drinks in hand, looking back at the groin boils and broken toenails. Jade and Verona walked off, presumably to talk with this important old man, and I followed behind from a distance—not wanting to be too close to Jade, but not wanting to be too far from Verona.
“Kurt?” someone asked.
A spindly girl with a grocery bag neck emerged from the sea of locusts. What was her name? Stacy? Her eyes were stoned red and a glint of snot drooled from her nose, but otherwise she was very well dressed. She gave me a sloppy hug. “Kurt, I love that shirt!” She ran her hand over the pink flowers. Verona and Jade had disappeared.
“Uhh, thanks,” I said, looking through the crowd for a flash of red hair. “Verona picked it out.” Maybe that would get her to take her hands off me.
She pointed at one of the drinks in my hand. “Hey, is that for me?”
My arms were tired from holding the cups, so I handed both over to her. “Sure.”
“Kurt,” she emphasized, taking a long swig. “It’s so good to see you.” Why did she have to keep using my name? “You need to come over to Mark’s more often, it’s always a party. Bring Verona too!” The muscles in her neck tightened.
“Stacy,” a voice called from behind her, “come on. Let’s go.”
“Oh, I gotta go, Kurt,” she said, finishing the first drink in its entirety. “Good to see you. Tell Verona I said ‘hi’ and we all have to get together soon!” She ran to catch up with the group of people that had been calling her, and I patted my blazer pocket to make sure my Xanax and Vicodin were still there.
Instead of searching for Jade and Verona, I found a seat on an open bench. There were paintings everywhere. Directly in front of me was an entire city resting on the slopes of an erupting volcano. It spanned from floor to ceiling, and I wondered what would happen if it fell on me. Next to it was a painting of some fully naked man with an elephant trunk for a dick. This was supposed to be art?
My phone buzzed with a message from Clair.
Sunday night. 10:55 PM. Five Leaves Library.
I deleted the message. Clair told me to always delete her messages about drug pickups, which I thought was weird considering she had a giant drug-budget spreadsheet on her computer. The bench squeaked as someone sat down next to me, and at their hands to make sure it wasn’t Jade and his manicured fingers. But the person was wearing gloves. Nice gloves. They were black and glossed and matched the person’s polished shoes.
The giant clock in the ballroom said it was 8:44 PM. I tried to subtract that from the time I sat down, but I couldn’t remember when that was. The person with the nice shoes had finally left, and the giant volcano painting still hadn’t fallen over on me. Verona’s red hair bobbed through the crowd.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, coming up to me. “Jade was right. That actually was Gérard Ponce.” I pushed myself from the bench to stand next to her. “And guess what? He loved my painting. The one of you.” She took my hand, tugging on it. “He said it reminded him of Francis Bacon’s later work. Can you believe that? Francis fuckin’ Bacon”
“That’s great!” I managed to say. I didn’t know who Francis Bacon was.
“I mean, he essentially shit on all my other work. But, fuck, I’ll take what I can get.” The words spilled out of her mouth. “He even said he would consider recommending me if I wanted to continue my education at the Fine Arts school in Paris.”
Shit. The school in France. I forgot.
“That’s great!” I repeated.
Verona pulled on my wrist, leading us deeper into the hotel’s ballroom. “Well I owe it all to your face,” she winked. “Thanks for letting me use it.” Blood diverted into my elephant trunk, as we stopped at the framed canvas of her coyote painting. “I mean it really did come out better than I could have imagined.”
I was confused. This wasn’t a picture of me. This was the picture of the animal draped in rope—the black and white silhouette. The coyote. “Right. So…where is it?” I asked, looking behind my shoulder for other canvases.
“Oh, stop,” Verona chuckled, “I know you're much more beautiful in person, but you got to admit, it’s pretty close.”
I stared into the image, rubbing my eyes. The tufts of outlined fur morphed around until they became spikes of hair. Human hair. My hair. It was like an optical illusion or one of those ink-blot tests. The stretched out paw was actually my mouth, even the scar was captured as a soft, gray stroke. The long pink strings were emanating from the bottom of the frame, stretching from the center of where my painted heart was supposed to be. I patted my blazer pocket to make sure my Xanax and Vicodin were still there.