I told Lucy that I had a less than perfect relationship with her finger. I’d never write anything about Lucy that I wouldn’t say to her directly. I said, “Lucy, I have a less than perfect relationship with your finger.”
This was years ago, of course. She said, “You mean how it points to Pegasus?”
“Something like that,” I said.
She had a habit of getting us into situations that I would classify as dangerous. One time my car ran out of gas at the edge of a lake. Lucy had said, “Let’s follow this road.” She pointed at the road with her finger. I turned. The road went on and on. The needle went down and down. We were miles on that little road to nowhere. I told her, “This is leading us nowhere and we’re running low on fuel.”
“Keep going,” she said, pointing forward. The road, after an hour or so, ended at the lake. The way it ended made me crazy. It just ended. Someone had made this road so that it just stopped at the shore of a lake, no signs, no indication of “where.”
We stopped. It was dark. The water bubbled with the activity of frogs. We were out of gas. Lucy got out of the car and said, “look at the stars.”
My idea of adventure is a pencil, a book, and a chair.
I blamed her finger.
I blamed the poetry she read by a woman who looks like a maniac on the rear cover of her slim, attractive volumes, a woman who looks like a those people you often see at Bluegrass concerts on farms when the sober members of the audience have all departed. Like people who bite into roots moments after they’ve been dug out of the ground, like those people you see in old photographs sitting on camels or wagons.
One of those poems, a favorite of Lucy’s, goes:
Eat stones colored raw
On close looking you will see
The bloody nerve endings of porpoise
Clean cuts through the heart of the mountain
Your feet wet from those distances
Whose measure is shattered glass
And so forth.
Imagine my trepidation then. In The City we had left Marcus’ baking loft, whose party ended early due to the heat. On our way to the station, I told Lucy: “I can hear the sizzle of the digital billboards. And the exhaust is putting dog tails at the front of my skull.” At a corner, we came upon a distressed child, standing against a wall. The little girl was crying quietly and staring through the numerous people and their bags. I tried to push Lucy through, but she stopped instead and asked the child what was the matter.
Lucy turned to me and said, “She says she can’t find her mother. She lost.”
“We should find a traffic cop. Ask her if her mothers has a cell phone,” I said. I wanted to get to the train. I wanted to go home.
Lucy asked the child more questions. The child knew nothing of cell phones. This child was small. She had arms and legs like those of unfed cats. She was red, sweating, and visibly shaking. She kept drawing her knuckles across the skin under her wet nose.
“Ask her where her mother went,” I told Lucy. Pedestrians kept bumping me in the shoulders. I was sweaty, hot, and growing angry. At that moment, I felt justified in tearing one of the child’s limbs off and eating it on the spot.
Lucy said, “We can’t leave her here.”
“Why is she here all by herself?” I said, distressed.
“We need to find a precinct, take her there. We can’t leave her here,” Lucy said, taking the child’s hand, which the child gladly gave up.
I wanted to find the train and go home. The heat from the pedestrian pack, the claustrophobic walls of the buildings which blew the heat of air against my forehead, the road roar of honking and engines–all of this was crushing my eyeballs.
I wanted to tear that child’s arms off and eat them. But I followed Lucy. Lucy for whom all things lost and dangerous is an attraction. I followed Lucy. She stopped at an intersection and pointed to some unknown place in The City distance.
