“I miss you Max. It feels like we haven’t done anything just us in forever.” Nan took a drag, snuggled closer, her hair sending itching twitching shivers through my spine. “What?”
“Whew just a shudder. Mmh, this work-stuff is a bastard pain. Listen, how about this. We’ll sort us out this weekend. No intrusions, just you and me. Picnic in the park after dark, barhop until they toss us out. Yeah? Go to some fancy place for dinner, get shitfaced on fine wine and harass the regulars.”
“Th, no. Not like that. That’s not what I want.”
I felt invisible on our bench. Engulfed by a mass of people strolling around the commercial street’s clouded cobblestones. Inaudible through the chatter of families on outings, burning through their savings. Japanese tourists with cameras dangling round their necks. Vagrant youth on summer holidays spreading unease by merely existing. I could’ve said anything at all and nobody would’ve noticed. I’ve got a bomb! People prancing around with shopping bags enjoying the dopamine high. Like the kebab-man just walked past. Glossy hair-noir moussed up, D&G sunglasses, draped in designer shit from glossy toes on up, with a glossy bag dangling from his hairy gold-watch wrist. He was positively radiating. Yesterday he took orders and hectored an army of three brandishing kebab-blades and sauce bottles. Or the generic family of five. Defeated look on daddy’s face as he tried to keep tabs on the kids with little success, lid kept on despite the tauntings and teasings of the eldest. She’s smart, she knows he can’t hit her out here.
“I want to become really really small and live inside of you,” Nan said after silence.
“But babe,” I replied, shaking her off me so that I could envelop her face with my palms, forehead-against-forehead. “Ok. So you mean just us. Locked doors, disconnected phones. A carton of Tram and MD, bubbly, music, corny love poems.”
She smiled, nodded.
“No uppers,” she continued. “I can’t stand it. Like the last come-down – after the forest – I literally wanted to kill myself.” She sighed. “I just wanna get away from everything. From this shit town and all the shit people. I mean… look at them!” She gestured to the onglancers and bypassers, triggering nothing more than an involuntary mental note within her subjects. “I wanna go back to Marrakech again, or Istanbul, South Africa. My blood is on fire Max. I need to start moving.”
Nan had been around. A wanderer. She quit school to start working, saved up enough dough to jet around the earth while the rest of us had barely crossed state borders. When she met me I was a proper hick in comparison, terrified to even entergo into MCity. In all fairness, my image of the outside world had been tainted by rotten encounters with proper slags. I only left the county to score, re-up, make a cashdrop, getting summoned to rat’s nests in the projects by two-faced peddlers on an upward trajectory. Forced to share joints with vagrants and bangers, listen to stories that made me wanna gone git faster than I’d arrived. I’d hated it. Every second of it. Like when me and Teddy went to MCity the day before New Year’s Eve a couple of years back, told by a friend of a friend to get off the Paresiborg station. Hooded specters crept in and out of stairwells. Beamers drove by real slowlike, dead eyes of cleancut Arabs weighing us down. Naturally we stared back, as you do. There are rules of engagement. A fish reeks and calls for easy pickings. We’d both been around long enough to play the part, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, rationale screaming in a frenzy to get back on the train. Go home, lock the doors. Stop pushing, kiss yah muddah. Start going to church, bomb an abortion clinic. The number was a dud. An hour we waited with no response. My complaints in text, that we’d made the trip and weren’t leaving empty handed, were futile. So Teddy tried his sister and to our surprise she said she’d oblige on the condition that we bought some for her as well, pro bono. Thirty minutes and a stroll down to the Chaplin Grill later, a jittery bastard comes up, asks us what we want. We were going for the general direction of mushrooms, but curious about today’s specials. He recommended the acid, said he’d stopped selling benzo on account of being unable to keep his fingers away from the supplies. Said the last time he took it he’d blacked out for two days, woken up outside of IKEA in the blinding headlights of a patrol car in the middle of the night, shirt covered in blood with a box cutter in his hand. The coppers thought he’d attempted suicide, drove him to the hospital where they couldn’t find a single scratch. So stay away from the bennies kids, hehe. Jessie, Teddy’s sister, told me that she fell in love with me in that trip. That some higher power had overwhelmed her, chanting internally that she must have me. That's also the explanation she gave for the bite mark on my forehead that very evening. It started with her toying that she wanted to eat me, when suddenly she sunk her teeth in hard enough to puncture skin. All while Teddy was glued to his computer chair, playing Super Mario Brothers on an emulator, bitpop rolling over the hop hop boop boop.
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And then came Nan and swept me off my feet. As soon as I’d saved up enough money, I wanted to show her that I could play ball, pass off as a fellow metropolitan. We bought tickets to Amsterdam, roamed around town on a budget reserved for highs, barely eating over the whole weekend. Next came Marocko where they told us the hashish was so strong it put the dogs to sleep, tram was sold over the counter, porter of our shabby hotel giving us tips of different villages in the mountains where we could stay for weeks at his aunties or uncles if we wanted to, by the foot of the Atlas mountains, poppy fields your neighbor. Nan in Marocko was a sight. They’d never seen anything like it before. Couldn’t keep their eyes off her. They’d seen foreigners, women – sure. But no Nan. Carrying herself like she knew her worth. Knew exactly how to lift every man up with a simple wink, make him soar, offer her whatever she wanted. And now, it was time again.
“Well, we’re not exactly loaded,” I replied.
“So you bragging about how much you’re selling? It’s all words?”
“You know that the big check comes in next month. And besides, that can’t take us anywhere worthwhile. You wanna go on a ferryride to Poland? I know some people.”
“Very funny.” She laid down on the bench, head in my lap, lifted up her sunglasses, before continuing. “When summer’s over I’m going. I can’t stand doing this shit anymore. I’ll have a fit if I have to ask another person if they wanna join Amnesty.”
“Can’t you ask them something else? Where they stand on female genital mutilation?”
“Shut up. Don’t ruin the moment.”
“Had a guy from the Red Cross stop me the other day, asked me what do you think about female mutilation? And I was like, huh? And he was like, do you know what female mutilation is? I nodded, and he asks well what do you think about it? Isn’t that just cheap? Like I’m gonna debate him on it. It’s rigged, everything in that whole conversation works from the premise that I’m an asshole that don’t give two shits about sacrificial labia if I walk off.”
“You’re ruining it.”
“He left me no choice.”
She sighed.
“What did you say?”
“That I’d had one and I loved it, wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”
The clouds parted ever so slightly, letting a lonesome ray of sun trickle down on our lot just past the rooftops of the towering buildings with their neon letters in pink and red. I too wanted to vomit on all of it. The menial office existence starting to get to me, Mom guilt-tripping me for not coming over to visit as much, Cor-fucking-tez prancing around the cubicles. I felt a snap coming on. A need to destroy something. Anything. But at the same time, a new dawn was peering over the horizon. Teddy joining the ranks of Todo International was a sure sign that we were passing over some sort of ledge, a wild ride that enticed me to carry on. Monday was coming up real fast, and with some sleight of hand I could find a way to reconnect with Nan over the weekend, calm her down, and focus all my energy on Teddy. You can’t get bored when you’re around him, you just can’t.
I caressed Nan’s arm, all velvet. Not a hair on her body, except for their designated areas. She was the strong one. The one supposed to carry me like an effigy inside her, but I could sense a rift, a distortion since our outing to the woods. A kid, around four or five, walked up to us with his dumb-looking kid’s face grinning.
I wanted to punch it, but didn’t even get to finish the thought before he was tucked onwards by his mother via the leash attached around his waist.
“Jesus fucking christ,” I whispered.
“Can’t we just clock out? Go to the beach.”
“I’d love it. But I got a meeting with the big man – CEO Williams – in ten minutes.”
“How utterly fucking boring,” she said and lit another cigarette.