tonight, she dumped her stuff in the middle of the floor and scrutinized the squalor. What had she done here except time? She had wrapped rubber bands around doorknobs and subscribed to The Denver Post, but she was still a squatter. She saw her neighbors every day, smelled their cooking, and heard them have sex, but she never felt like she could knock on their doors and borrow an egg. She didn’t know their names. They didn’t know her, or like her. All her furniture had once sat on a nearby corner with a “Free” sign on it. She didn’t own anything she couldn’t move herself.
She kept a goldfish in a coffeepot. It swam upside down, too dumb to die. And every time she tried houseplants, she was reminded of the phrase, “Death comes to us all.” She never understood why they shriveled up, those quiet little guilt-trippers. They seemed so needy, always wanting water and giving nothing back to the world but (huh!) oxygen. Once, she found an abandoned cactus in a terra-cotta pot, sitting on the curb. She put that plant in her window and watered it for a year before she realized that it was plastic.
Home, this wasn’t.
Two weeks ago, a drunken ex-wrestler tried to slap her. As she blocked his hand, he followed with a punch to her jaw that she was too late to slip. Nina saw black, tasted aluminum. For a few seconds, she was unconscious on her feet, and her heart stopped in her ribcage.
Her twin brother’s face loomed in the ether, just like in cartoons and movies. He was huge, filling every inch of the screen of her mind.
“Hey, Chris,” she said. “What’s up?”
He looked at her the way a person looks at his own hangnail. Unfettered by consciousness, Nina missed him with the force of a tsunami, with a violent undertow of hope that she hadn’t realized was still there.
Then Chris was gone and she was back on the street, her heart beating again, that stubborn machinery. The sweating face of the ex-wrestler had replaced her brother’s, and she stumbled backward at the ugly transformation. The man reached into the back of his pants and pulled out a gun.
Nina turned and ran, but he shot at her anyway. The bullet whistled just past her head. The sound punctured a hole in her eardrum. That week, every time she had a cigarette, smoke leaked from her left ear.
What if she had caught that bullet? She’d never see her brother again. She’d never see anything again. She would end up unclaimed in the morgue, her body disposed of like medical waste, dumped from drawer to incinerator. No lover would mourn her. Nobody’s life would be ruined by her absence. Isn’t that why people had husbands, families, children? Isn’t that what everyone wanted, in the end? To be vital enough to ruin a life?
If you’ve lost your way, you retrace your steps, and hers dead ended with Chris, wherever and whatever he was. As the wind pushed against her windows, Nina studied the list of names and phone numbers she had bought from an elderly private investigator. Hundreds of Chris Blacks, all in California, if that was even where he was.
Nina laid a ceramic plate on the floor next to her phone, unwrapped a Twinkie, and poked a pink-and-white striped candle into it. She struck a match and touched it to the wick, humming “Happy Birthday” to herself and her absent twin. Shy and unaccustomed to wishing, she silently appealed to the water stain on the ceiling.
Then, in the wee hours of her twenty-eighth birthday, Nina Black blew out her candle, picked up the phone, and dialed the first number on the list of two hundred forty-three. A lady answered, voice mushy with sleep. “Hello,” Nina began, clearing her throat. “I’m looking for Chris Black? My brother?”
Chapter Three: Acting
In Japan, they have a river monster named Kappa. He has scaly skin and a turtle shell on his back. The top of his head is a small dish that holds water, so he can breathe on land. His face looks like a monkey’s, but with a beak instead of lips.
Deadly sumo wrestlers, Kappa monsters are very polite. If a Kappa challenges you to a fight, just bow to him. He will bow back, spill all his breathing water, and be forced to return to the river. This is a good trick to know, because Kappa is ferocious. He thinks it’s funny to pull people’s intestines out through their anuses. He also eats children.
While children taste good to Kappa, his favorite food is cucumbers. To ensure that the Kappa won’t eat their children, Japanese parents write the children’s names on cucumbers and throw them into ponds and rivers. They watch the cucumbers float on the water, perhaps feeling a little silly. Regardless, their children don’t get eaten. It still works.
~
I’m baloney, Isaac thought. Baloney.
“Harder, baloney,” the director barked into his wholly unnecessary megaphone. “Shake it harder!”
“It” was Isaac’s costume, a codpiece made out of real baloney. They called it a loincloth, but nobody was fooled. Isaac jangled his hips until the thing jerked and bobbed in front of him, grease smearing all over his junk, while he belted the chorus of “My Way.” Jailbait girls sang backup in string bikinis with baloney breasts and cheese slices flapping at their hips like fringe.
“Cut,” the director said.
The cheese slices had unwrapped themselves again in the heat from the lights on the set. The costume director rushed on set again with fresh slices and a stapler. They were now on Take Thirteen. Chaz, the director, shouted at her, “Try superglue,” waved at Isaac, and pointed at the ground in front of him.
Isaac approached Chaz, teeth-first. “Hold this,” Chaz said and handed him a half-empty water bottle. Isaac took the bottle and Chaz made another note on his clipboard, muttering without looking up, “Frankly, I’m not feeling your commitment.” Chaz winced at his watch. “This is an important commercial. It revolves around this damn dream sequence. I need you to really”—he formed little Italian circles with both hands and shook them lightly—“embody the product.”
“Got it.” Isaac stood straighter. “I am the baloney.”
“That’s why we hired you, and not any of those other assholes.”
“I’m just wondering…why we’re wearing the actual product. On our bodies.”
“The client wants authenticity, Eraserface. Don’t you want to be authentic?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Isaac cleared his throat. “Just…still wondering who might want to buy baloney if I’m wearing it on my crotch, you see.”
“They’re marketing to women,” Chaz said and walked away, leaving Isaac with his water bottle.
In one swift pivot, Isaac hurled the bottle against a wall.
The bottle just made a popping noise as it bounced off the wall and rolled all the way back to Isaac’s feet. None of the people circulating around the studio even noticed.
“Why did you do that?” Kate was standing behind him with her doll. The two of them gave Isaac the same stare with different colored eyes.
“I thought you were waiting in the viewing area,” Isaac said. “Kids aren’t supposed to be on the set.”
“I got bored. And hungry.”
Isaac fetched her a sandwich from the catering table. He slumped into a chair next to her, making sure the codpiece
