Wild Awake

asks me if I want to party. He’s older than most of the crowd here. I wonder if he’s a talent scout for a major label. I grin. “Monomaniacs were born to party.”
    We go out onto the fire escape, and he pulls a wrinkled joint out of the pocket of his black leather jacket. The jacket is stiff like armor and blackly shiny. My eyes keep on being drawn to it as if I’m hoping to see my reflection, but you can’t quite see your reflection in the leather’s muffled light. We smoke the joint. It’s strong. Sometimes joints aren’t very strong, but this one is. I feel like the space inside my chest is expanding and all my organs are floating apart. Is that supposed to happen? Motorcycle Man is smiling like he’s pleased with something. He takes out a small plastic bag with some yellow pills in it.
    “You have a very attractive body,” says Motorcycle Man.
    Monomaniacs are known for their physiques.
    “Want to try something?”
    Monomaniacs will try anything.
    He shakes out two pills. “Enjoy.”
    I swallow them. A monomaniac always enjoys.
    My internal organs that are floating apart start to glow with heat like baked yams. The best yam in the world is the garnet, because it is a jewel. It is a jewel and I have six internal organs, six glowing jewels that shine through my skin like flashlights. Motorcycle Man’s hand floats toward my waist and sticks there. Is this what is meant by an attractive body? A body to which other bodies are summoned like migrating butterflies? I start to recite Shakespeare. I am the beast and Juliet is the gun. No, I am the feast and Juliet is the bun. If I click my silver heels together, I will wake up on my bicycle. I will sail through the air with my monocle planted firmly in my eye socket and my hands wrapped around the handlebars like vines.
    Skunk, damn you, you should have come .
    Motorcycle Man is whispering suggestions in my ear. His latest suggestion: Come for a ride with me.
    I don’t think we’re making out, but maybe we are. The glowing jewel of my brain struggles with the distinction. His hand is attracted to the part of my leg that is just barely covered by the otter-slickness of my black dress. I’m trying to guess how old he is. Numbers float out of my head like bubbles.
    “Thirty-three,” murmurs Motorcycle Man.
    I turn the number over and over like a secret code. Thirty-three. As in 4:33. As in the piano piece by John Cage that is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of nothing but rests.
    An untraceable blur of seconds passes. I count to 4:33.
    Then I am in a car with black leather seats and a stereo that glows like a slot machine.

chapter thirty-five
    “Kiri. Kiri!”
    On Hastings Street I am so very busy and walking so very fast that when I hear Skunk calling my name it takes me almost three blocks to turn around. My knees are scraped again, but I don’t think it’s from crashing a bicycle since I’m not riding one. Then I remember—I was in a car with a man, some kind of label rep, but the stereo played evil music so I screamed, “Pull over!” and clawed my way out onto the sidewalk like a shipwreck survivor washing up on a rocky beach. Sukey died in a car crash—at least she did originally—and I did not like the way his hands strangled the wheel like white tentacles and his eyes were twin heat guns on my skin.
    I stop on the sidewalk, and Skunk swoops up next to me. Skate shoes. No helmet. He brakes, jumps off his bike, and catches me in his arms like I’m a blown-away newspaper he’s been chasing down the street.
    “Kiri. I’ve been looking all over for you. Whose car was that?”
    I give him a once-over. Sunshine is streaming out of his head in a huge pink-and-gold halo despite the fact that the rest of the street is still dark. His black bicycle is glazed in neon light. When he talks, his words reverberate weirdly, like he’s speaking into a microphone with a delay line. I think I might be dreaming, or the subject of a very elaborate hoax. I put my hands on my hips and squint. “Are you a trick?”
    “No. I promise, no.”
    “How can I tell?”
    He sticks out his arm for me to smell. I put my nose against his sleeve. American Spirits. Lapsang souchong. WD-40.
    I nod reluctantly.
    “Okay.”
    Skunk glances up and down the street as if he’s afraid there are spies in the doorways or snipers on the roof. Maybe he’s worried about the homeless men trundling down the middle of the road with their shopping carts full of empty bottles.