Mercedes sedans on their night soaps. Green grass, high heels, tuxedos, endless unmarried fucking. A world without facial issues. Mercedes sedans. An impossible world. Was the woman in the low car an apparition?
Covered in dents and scratches, missing a front fender, muffler scraping the north highway. The woman fell from the driver’s seat of the Mercedes sedan, the car still running, skinning her thigh badly and showing her underwear. It was underwear from elsewhere. Her upper portion smelled like gasoline. Her lower portion urine. She had sucked gas into her mouth. The people of the territory knew about siphoning.
The car radio was playing a song our people had never heard. A kind of music they could not get their heads to move to. A 5/4 beat. Think about that later. For now, one of the men reached in and turned off the ignition of the Mercedes. Our people did not let their vehicles run in May. Winter, sure. Winter, hell yes. But, May? Snowmobiles, generators, chainsaws—what would we do without fuel? When one of the broader men bent down for the woman, she flinched, and then put her arms around his neck. The movement, when it came, was swift and rabid. Feeling a rush, another one of the meeker men joined the effort, though the woman was so thin and without muscles that, not useful, he backed away.
Our people were frightened of the woman. We’d never had a complete stranger here. Never had someone just show up. Was she a descendant of the Leader? She looked like she could come from that stock. Fine bone structure. Luxury vehicle. Do we shoot her or do we feed her? The broad man who had picked her up carried her into Home of the Beef Candy, conscious her dress was up around her waist and her black underwear could not be bought in town. The Heavy was standing in line at the lunch counter taking the place of two territory men. The woman saw him, crawled out of the broad man’s arms, stopped crying immediately, and placed her body against The Heavy’s body. Body on body. Like that, her focus shifted. The Heavy bought her a meal. The woman ate like a predator. The Heavy bought her a second meal. Our people gathered around her, filling the restaurant, spilling out onto the north highway, looking through the window. The men knew to stand beside their wives. They all waited for the woman to speak.
Our people would say later, about your mother, Who knows, maybe women from elsewhere like men with facial issues. Your father had pulled off and burned the last of his bandages just that morning. The morning he saw your mother for the first time. FYI. No joke. Totally perf.
After that, Lana and I played a game we called Wanting. She went first: I want Sexeteria to push up the back of my skirt with his face. And then make me a very mixed tape. I want braces. I want a chain-link fence with red roses threaded through it. Real ones. I want a lace bodysuit with a mock turtleneck. I want to call my first son Everlasting. I want to spend a week in a hotel. I want the pill. And I want the territory to be rich again. Or at least how it was five years ago. And I want 9-1-1. I could have really used 9-1-1. And I want Def Leppard to know my name. Lana Barbara Smith. Lana Barbara. I am like that town in California, but minus California.
Lana and I were fifteen, which was only three years away from getting pregnant and married and pulling our hair back into ponytails of duty and service and wearing pastel dresses and taking the blood of the teenagers at the Banquet Hall and then sitting on the leatherette chairs in our kitchens to look out over the snowfields, our children in them, standing tall on piles of aluminum with rabbit feet around their necks and blowtorches in their hands. We have a very small window, I wanted to say to Lana. Urgent. Very. Small. Window. Urgent.
Some of the fathers had already started warming up to The Heavy. I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Gold Lady Gold name necklace (because I was a virgin). I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Walkman (because I was an untouched virgin). The fathers knew what this meant, and they were taking note of me for their sons, who, at this age, were just starting to get their nicknames. So while we got jewelry that was quick to tarnish or a Walkman that was sure to break, the boys got nicknames of infamy like Fang and T-Bone. The Heavy wanted nothing to do with the fathers. I wanted nothing to do with their sons.
OUTSIDE OUR BUNGALOW, the northwest wind has died down, and it has started to rain. I hear ice slide off the roof. It hits the hard ground and smashes apart, making my body jump. My mother left just over two hours ago. Her eyes flat, her skin the color of nicotine. Her parting words––“I had forgotten all about you”––echo in my head. If my mother has forgotten all about me, what’s to stop her from leaving the territory for good? A space has opened between us. It feels uncrossable. A war, an entire sea. Me on one side. And my mother on the other, disappearing from view. My pulse pounds in my ears. My throat tightens. Don’t cry now. Cry later. Cry in your sleep. I turn on all the lights and climb the stairs. I consider calling Lana, asking her to come over, but she has no idea. The Heavy and I have kept my mother’s illness a secret, even from each other. It’s not like we agreed to this. We’re the same. Do not enter. Private property. About the sudden change that came over my mother three months ago, we haven’t spoken a word.
Her bedroom is directly across the hall from mine. She thought to close her door before she left.
On my wall, I have a black-and-white picture of Muhammad Ali that I tore from a magazine that’s a decade old. Ali is holding up a piece of paper that says, THE SECRET OF MUHAMMAD ALI. When I have my portrait done, this is how I’ll do it. Beside him is my blood schedule for the month. The days I have completed are x-ed out, and above it is a postcard Lana put in our mailbox that just says, SIGH!!! I have Ric Ocasek’s face inside Samuel Beckett’s hair in a frame beside my bed. He is wearing dark sunglasses and under him I have written DREAM MACHINE.
PONY BECKETT OCASEK.
Le Pony Beckett Ocasek.
The Secret of Le Pony Dream Machine Beckett Ocasek Ali.
I GLUE RHINESTONES around my eyes. I put on my mother’s camouflage tracksuit and her gold hoop earrings. I have two books on my bed: my disease book, which from the Latin loosely translates into Brutal Errors of the Human Body, and a romance novel, Chance Encounter, that I stole out of a turquoise mother purse at the Banquet Hall. My album cover collection takes up half a wall. It is in milk crates. I have it organized by emotion. To be free is to have achieved your life. Someone said this once. I’ll count my money later when I’ve got more to add to it.
I am going to the bonfire. Whether The Heavy comes back or not, I am going. I sat at my mother’s door with my knees folded to my chest for the last two months. You can see the imprint in the carpet, where it has worn out and the vinyl floor is shining through. I pushed notes under her door. Notes I don’t know that she ever read, or even saw.
I am not waiting anymore. I have plans.
Wantings.
I press play on my tape recorder, and the Gregorian chants come on. I borrowed them from the Lending Library after I heard them coming from the tormented headphones of Supernatural. I wanted to ask him if I could listen to them, but I had forgotten how to speak. We were lying side by side on the cots at the Banquet Hall having just had our blood taken. I was trying to subtly Whitesnake my body while he lay perfectly still, staring up, black paint on his jeans and smelling like woodstove, which was more than I could handle. His boots hung over the end of his cot. I pretended we were in bed together, that our cots were joined and the bed was a waterbed, and we were in a field where we wouldn’t get shot or mauled. Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. Someone said this once. Here, you have a rest. Here, you have some citrus. This one’s a fainter. Oh, look at her go. Have mercy. The women in their puffed-sleeved pink dresses, talking about me, moving busily around me, gripping my shoulders, getting me to put my head between my knees and make it settle, then lift it up slowly, slower now, Pony Darlene. That’s a girl. God, you look like your mother. Doesn’t she now?
SUPES IS THE SON of Traps, the truck dealer, and his wife, Debra Marie, and he is by far the best-looking boy in the territory. He was also the youngest boy in the history of our people to be given his nickname. Let me give you the lay of the land. It is between the ages of fourteen and nineteen that a territory boy gets his nickname. He will be called by this nickname until he is buried at final resting. It is his nickname, burned into a piece of shellacked plywood, that will be placed under his portrait when the territory