Terrorist
by Marya Spence

I saw the man’s eyes before I saw his face. They bulged like globes on a curved plane. I never thought he was attractive, in fact. He was too greasy and too eager. From behind, I stared over the top of the airplane seat at the bald spot on his head. I counted fading freckles and the splatters of sun-spots there. It felt so maliciously comfortable to stare at him like that. He couldn’t have known I was watching him. I loathed him silently. I imagined his skin to possess a shifting, slick quality like an unhealthy sea lion’s. A certain firmness lacking, a certain degeneration taking over. I was glad the hard seatback cushion stood between us.

And yet, he smiled through it all. The whole seven hours of that flight. He scratched letters onto the crossword page, he asked the flight attendant for a red wine – and then another – he even watched the movie I watched and he laughed when the Hollywood celebrity wore sunglasses to his college roommate’s funeral. In the movie, the producer autographed the blown-up picture of the dead man, wreathed by drooping lilies next to a glossy over-lit coffin. He thought it was a picture of himself. The audience of funeral attendants gasped at this mistake of arrogance. I laughed then too – it was just so absurd it made that funeral fucking hilarious. In the airplane seat, I was laughing to myself and drinking diet coke and planning when I could make it to the bathroom between stewardesses and their gliding metal blocks.

The man was smiling, not to spite my vague abhorrence of him, but mainly because a pretty girl was talking to him across the aisle, to his direct right and to my diagonal right. She was a freshman in college, she said. She was going home for break, she said. She thought the East was soooo cold, she said. She really liked that movie, she said – did he like it? He did. He especially liked that part where the heiress snob slipped on spilt pearls in her black marble bathroom and she fell down, in slow motion, broke that beautiful neck. That was a beautiful shot, he said – not to sound morbid or anything, it was just beautiful the way she arched and floated so slowly into the ground. I agreed, but I also thought it was too obviously artsy, so predictable to bring the easy target down in slow motion. It reeked of justice. The plummet was only beautiful because you could call it fate, because you would shiver to see hollow statues break into a thousand scattering bits. I would have told him that, if he had asked.

The girl was nodding eagerly at his truly judicious remarks, glowing fiercely with interest in his ideas about movies; about the intensity of East coast weather versus the mild seasonality of the West coast; about how college days are the last good ones before you resign yourself to responsibility and chain yourself to a desk. He must have been around forty. He sounded stupid saying these things. She was sandy-complexioned with slightly plump arms any man might have wanted to hold. She was all fuzz and peach and stone. I imagined that from a closer vantage point her skin was actually covered in a fine white down that only made her more charming to look straight in the face. She was chatty, a little breezy in her words, a little feverish below the surface and giving off a pleasant heat from the forward globes of her bobbing cheeks.

I watched the two interact from my safe and slanted view. They fell into silence between pockets of conversation – he returning to the crossword in supposed contemplation, she playing with the cap on her bottle of water, nibbling deliciously with her teeth, visibly thinking of new things to say. When she stared forward like that, thinking hard, I saw how her eyelashes were thick like a doe’s partly because she had fingered a soft gray eyeshadow onto their lids. My eyelashes are thin and pale. I know guys like this sometimes but it doesn’t seem quite enough to me. It is too translucent; I am too not there. My eyelashes are either see-through feathers, or, if I encase them in black mascara, plastic spider legs. I am either breathy-gossamer or I am spiny and feline. I am not flesh and stone and heat.

But I could have been her. 24C and 25F: this was the only difference between us. Up one seat, over two. She had to pass seven rows of seats to get to the bathroom in the back; I only had to pass six. My oval window was two seats to my left; her oval window was two seats to her right. She must have seen different-shaped parking lots and different-colored rooftops out of her window when we landed; I squinted across my neighbors’ laps to catch a glimpse of how the left side of the runway lay atop gray dishwater. She got her hot meal before I did, because she was closer to the front of the plane; but I didn’t have to crane my neck with pain to watch the movie, the way she must have had to, because I was farther back than she was. She was on his right side, and I was behind him.

When I got into the city from the airport, up the elevator to Anna’s apartment, and into her shabby kitchen, I felt my hunger like a hollow kick. I also felt my boredom settle over me. I must have been bored all day on the plane, but now, alone, it caught up with me. I took a cough drop out of my pocket and lay down on the couch as flat as I could, because suddenly the silence in the whole apartment lay flat and heavy as a second cinderblock ceiling. I needed to lay under it, and I imagined the dull headache I’d get standing up.

I closed my eyes and saw constellations of freckles and sun-spots swirling on a shiny plastic planet. Sometimes, the splotches looked like they had legs, like spiders or maybe like suns with spikes of light around them. I went over some mental notes in my head, tracing the outline of a sketch but passing just lightly over it, my mind like a finger tracing well-worn penciled lines, these lines better in their rough versions than finalized in ink. The sketch was simple:

Sleeping felt okay, but being awake felt better. This wasn’t an unusual feeling for me. And when I slept, I never really felt asleep. Being alone in Anna’s apartment was going to be hard for me, but I had sent myself there to try to make some things feel better. Somehow, being alone seemed the solution to everything these days. It was all-purpose and always ready. But this felt lonelier and I must have started to panic.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the way that man had wanted that girl. I knew it then and I knew it now. Anyone could have seen it, but I was the one who watched. No matter what she says, every girl, at some point in her life, has felt the heat of a man in want of her – a strange man, a stranger, watching from the safe estranged distance of strangerhood, but plotting the points he’ll hit along the way to get closer to her. Strange, strange. He’ll aim for acquaintance but pray for a fuck. Not all men are like this, and not all strangers want something they’re not saying, but some of them do both. These men lay like sea lions. They are down and dead until they raise their head and open their big black eyes at the passing world.

I’ve always prided myself in my ability to shut people down. The art of the shutdown requires an element of surprise, or else it’s not a shutdown. The element of surprise, in turn, is all about timing. Perfect timing breaks a neck cleanly, bringing a pure and resonant high derived from the sudden explosion of blackness. I like to think of myself as exploding this blackness in people’s faces in a truly tasteful way. I don’t like things pathetic, nor do I like them out of my control. I like even exchanges, and then I like them to end. If things don’t shut down right, I feel robbers all around me.

One time a man walked with me for four blocks down 80^th and by the time we got to Zabar’s Grocery I realized he’d used me. He’d used my time. I had stopped paying attention and now he was talking about his new mountain bike or investment deals. I didn’t know him. What was he talking about? What had I been thinking while he talked? All of a sudden, I couldn’t remember the past four blocks. I got scared feeling like I had blacked out. Four blocks seemed like a vacuum. I decided he was the Devil and he’d stolen my mind, somehow when I was looking away, making sure cars didn’t hit me, or thinking about the way treetops make the middle canopy of the city jungle, lain as they are between the layer of people-tops and the layer of building-tops. And while thoughts curled inside my head, all along the Devil had walked beside me. He clung to my right. His stride stayed so gratingly within mine. He knew what he was doing, he did it all the time. There wasn’t anything new about me. I told him I had to go into Zabar’s now and he should probably leave. His eyes flashed “bitch” and I gave my back to them, thinking as I walked into colder air how my sweaty shirt must have been clinging to the wings of my shoulderblades. I felt he had taken my soul.

On the third day at Anna’s, at around 10 am, I turned on the television to have some noise while I perused her kitchen for the fiftieth time. “This morning,” I thought grandly to myself, “I will have cold chow mein and banana chips for breakfast. It will be a feast to end all feasts.”

Things were looking better this morning. The sun was out – that was nice. Maybe I’d go for a walk. But then maybe I’d take a shower first. Maybe I’d call my mom and tell her I was doing okay and that it was sunny, and that today I was going to go outside for a walk, but first I was going to take a shower. She’d be happy to hear this report on my life. On the days when I could give her a gift like this, I liked to take the opportunity. It felt good, when I could, to let her hear me smile over the phone.

I thought my morning feast was pretty funny, too, so I also thought I might call Anna, and tell her what I was doing in her apartment. She laughs when I call her, if she’s not sitting at work distracted by her computer. When this is the case, this usually means she’s leaving work, walking down a busy street. All the honking and zooming and smelly people exacerbate the precise hilarity of my conversation over the phone. “Hey, Anna, guess what I’m doing right now. Spring break is amazing. I’m sitting on your couch eating chow mein and banana chips for breakfast…yeah don’t worry, I know the chow mein’s ancient because I just noticed it sitting creepily in the fridge this morning and I definitely haven’t ordered any Chinese yet. Also, the noodles seem to be forming a plastic outer shell. Whatever. Remember how Aunt Mags always called anything over three days old just ‘good fiber?’ Yeah, I’ve been rethinking that. It might make a lot of sense.”

Anna likes my flat, sarcastic voice that can only come out of a genuinely good mood. I agree with her preference for this particular side of me. I think it is the healthiest version of myself.

I picked up the phone and prepared to walk back to the kitchen table so I could call Anna from in front of my bowl, but before I could turn away, I noticed a slip of paper that had been sitting under the phone on the counter. It grinned up at me pridefully. I leaned in closer, somehow afraid to touch it. I squinted at the words, for no particular reason, since it wasn’t hard to see what was written there.

I felt fire in my hand. Impulsively, I opened the fridge. In the cold there, I saw a six pack of Magic Hat beer with four slots empty and two remaining bottles. In the stiff white drawers below, I found a loaf of whole grain bread untouched, red plastic jaws still clenched around spiraled plastic. Turkey was honey-roasted and deli-sliced, and had been broken into. There were four slices left and indentations in the plastic, industrially warped around 8 other slices. Missing. And one whole hard lemon, plus one half, sat dejected and squashed like a dry lung at the bottom of another drawer.

I’m not really afraid to touch objects that aren’t mine. I do it all the time, compulsively and strategically. I always put things back exactly in the position I found them. It’s not that I’m afraid of being caught as some sort of a snoop, I just think that whatever satiation that I get out of looking at someone else’s objects alone in a room, has nothing to do with whosever room I’m left alone in.

Being alone in a room means that no one is watching. No one watching means that you are standing in your own space. My space, I carry it around like equipment on my back. It is always there, waiting to be unzipped. When you leave me alone in a room, I unfold it and stand right in the center, as if on the exact mathematical center of a circular tarpaulin. You always have your space ready to take you, you know. You just need to find the right places to be alone in.

I was standing in the shower and looking for the coconut oil soap, but I wasn’t finding it. There wasn’t even soggy paper wrapping flattened on the side of the tub, which would mean the soap had been used up and Anna hadn’t thrown her shit away.

Anna was never good about throwing her shit away. Those plastic Chinese noodles in the fridge had Anna written all over them. But I liked the objects she left behind for me to find. I might put them back in their place, or I might throw them away for her. She’s the only person I’d throw things away for.

If I came across one of her objects and threw it away, I often hoped that she would come by that same spot later in the day, when I wasn’t around or when I was flipping through a magazine on the couch. I’d imagine that she’d notice the blank spot with surprise. And then she’d look over at me through the kitchen door, contemplate me skimming pages quietly in the living room. Then she’d look back at the blank spot on the counter. And it would slowly dawn on her that what was really there was not a blank spot but an actual note from me to her, a kind of hello, an invisible perfect print from the palm of my hand. I would have left a palm-print there for her, the best gift I could give. I would have placed it carefully on a hard surface, one of the fifty countertops and fridge doors and airplane windows we all stare at every day and feel dead for. It would have been compassion to do this, it would have been real love.

But I couldn’t find the coconut oil soap. I was still standing in the shower. I was staring at the ceramic edge of the tub where Anna’s object should have been. It was only hard and stared bare like an eyeball; there was nothing for me to remove. Water poured over whiteness. I got out of the shower and dried myself off, staring from the center of the room as I bent over, rubbing my legs vigorously. I scrutinized the bathroom countertops and the toilet top and the tops of the little shelves on the wall. But there was no coconut oil soap, and no forgotten wrapper.

My Aunt Mags used to mix beer and coconut oil soap to kill the snails that ate the rhododendrons in her garden box. She couldn’t stand the bomb-holes they ate into her leaves. I don’t know how she discovered this fatal mixture of household ingredients: whether it was simply information passed among watchdog women, or whether she had formulated it in secret, testing and stirring, until she found the perfect toxic trick.

I found the missing soap wrapper in Anna’s bathroom trash can, along with four empty bottles of Magic Hat beer. Comprehension seared through me fast and hard. My fingertips went numb. Anna had tricked me. She’d thrown away her evidence. She’d been doing magic behind my back.

The soap itself must have disappeared into the snail poison, which would now be sitting outside in dirt. I went to the glass. Anna’s garden looked perfect from inside the bathroom where I stood naked. When I placed my head in the center of the small square window, I saw how my eyes were doubled in the reflection on the glass pane. There were two sets of eyes there. But I wasn’t looking at them, I was only looking at how perfect Anna’s garden was. I felt again without a soul.

It was 11 am on the third morning at Anna’s apartment. The television was still on in the living room next to the kitchen, murmuring, just as I’d left it to go stand in the shower. I was eating chow mein like plastic on the flat gray couch in front of the TV, nervously skimming through a copy of National Geographic, waiting for something to happen but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know whether to listen for the phone to ring, or for the news anchorwoman to start screaming, or for the snails to come out from between the cushions and from under the doorjambs. But I was sure one of these things was going to happen. It might all be a sick joke, anyway, all Anna’s doing or the Zabar Devil’s. But the punchline hadn’t come yet. I felt this as fact, I felt it in the lifting lightness of my heartbeat.

I was closing my eyes, dozing druggedly and thinking of peaches and snails. Then it happened, and suddenly I knew how sick the joke really was.

My eyes flung open just as the news woman said “dead girl,” and the face on the screen was already beaming proud at me. I couldn’t believe how big my face looked up there on the screen. I couldn’t believe how pretty I looked – I was so proud. I couldn’t believe my eyes were so soft, so gray. Why didn’t anyone tell me I was this pretty? Why didn’t anyone tell me? I wish I’d known. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

My mother says I am some sort of a terrorist. Anna laughs and pats my back. She’s so good to me. She knows I’m a snoop and she knows I’m a terrorist, but she loves me anyway, because she has to. I’m the only sister she has.

According to report, the girl got off the plane with the middle-aged man and never made it to her mother’s house. She went to coffee with the strange man, and then she went to drinks with him, and then she walked into a hotel room with the strange man and then she disappeared. She had a lanyard in her pocket. I never saw her doing a lanyard from where I sat.

But you have to really listen to what they say. You have to watch it in your head. She didn’t disappear after struggled sex in the hotel. She actually disappeared in a bathroom stall, back at the airport. They say she changed her clothes in there, right after getting off the plane. From sweats to a skirt, from a looser shirt to a raspberry sweater. If you watch her get off the plane and enter the bathroom, you will never see her leave, not in a thousand million years. A different girl leaves, but the first girl is still there behind the tiled wall. Both girls have doe eyes, and both girls lay sealed, but only one gets raped.

So watch it. Pay attention. You’ll see one girl disappear straight into the bathroom wall, and another one walking straight out of that wall like an angel. She must have known she was going to die. She must have sealed herself inside the wall, then sent her ghost to meet the stranger outside.

They say I am a terrorist, and I am. But I know I’m not the first to feel so alone, so watched, so uncertain, and so just. The trouble is that I see myself wherever I go. The trouble is that I wish I didn’t. I am so alone this way; there is no one who is not me.

The trouble is that in fact you feel no different from me. The trouble is that I am transparent. Everyone I see is inside of me.

The trouble is that I wish the dead girl were not me. The trouble is that I know who she really was, but I don’t know who I am. She is still behind the wall. This will always be the trouble.

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