Borderlands Read online

  Well. This must be a bad dream and she was going to wake up, take her subtly green contacts out of the cooker, pop 'em in, and get back to work. Scuds or studs, ocean suds or dudes sans duds. In acrylic.

  Same stuff they made dentures out of

  Dot let go of the mailbox and staggered down Seagull Street, toward Seaview Lane, and home. Glass eyes. One–no, better make that two–for each outfit. A Marcos collection. Faberge eyes. With rhinestones in the middle, so they sparkled when she blinked. Blue, green, hazel, brown.

  Kaleidoscope tears.

  Going blind.

  Getting lost.

  In her stupor, her torpor, terror, Dot had steered by the wrong set of jagged cracks, and now she drifted thick in the Sargasso Sea of the town's bad side, and she was getting scared.

  Men were looking at her, sizing her up. Tall, dusky men with their hands in their pockets, hair nets on their heads, pulled down so the V pin-holed the center of their foreheads. Third eyes of malice. Women in black polyester sauntered past, narrowed their lids. Everyone stared with their perfect, bloodshot, eyes. Dot stomped down the Street as if she knew what she was doing.

  But what she was doing was getting lost, and part of her was astonished at how frightened she was about it. With each step across each trough of jagged crack, her heart pumped faster, brave little propeller muscle. Her stomach tightened, a stomach that had already become a hard, round clam, hiding inside itself. She was a distress beacon, announcing to all around her, all who wondered what an obviously middle-class honky Anglo woman was doing in the barrio-project-ghetto in the late afternoon, that she was vulnerable, and defenseless, adrift without food or water. Up the friggin' creek without a friggin' paddle.

  The sun dipped. A black dog with a running sore on its back trotted beside her, whimpering in tune to her heartbeat. "Shoo," Dot said, and her voice was wimpy and baby small.

  Lost. Mugged. Cut up real bad. Raped. Jesus God, blind girls tell no tales. Blind women talk of smells and sizes. White cane, black glass, might as well the fuck be naked with a glass eye bull's-eye painted on her crotch. No, officer, I don't know how tall he was or what color he was but he had a low voice and his dick was well, let's see, about two-thirds the size of yours.

  Three young Oriental boys in neon shorts and surfin' T-shirts wandered by, made comments, hooted, and chuckled. After they rounded the corner, Dot covered her mouth with her hand, fighting down the waves of panic. Trade it in, get her legs cut off. Motorized wheelchair, balloons fluttering saucily behind, marching in the parade for the rights of the disabled: that gal's got spunk!

  The row houses cantilevered over the streets like English Tudor monuments (her favorite naked man portrait: doublet, no hose, a feathered porkpie hat. Such eyes. Cobalt-dancing, shiny; in their way, erect.) The paint peeled off salmon stucco walls like rolled-up parchments. Broken windows bled the spray-painted hex signs of rival gangs. The stinks of garbage and urine, rotten fish and fuel sat on her chest like a quartet of demons. The dog barked, raised his leg against the corner of a chain link fence, peed.

  A door opened, slammed shut. Someone knocked from the inside—

  Knock knock.

  Who's there?

  You'll never know, will you, bitch? Once you lose sight of sight.

  Shadows drifted across her ankles. Dot swallowed hard and resisted the urge to stop walking and get her bearings. Better to look like she knew where she was going; better yet, that she was late for a very important date. She imagined herself as Eleanor Lance in one of her favorite movies, The Haunting: prim in her whipped cream and tweed, raising her nose in the air at the caretaker of the evil old haunted mansion and informing him, so stupidly, so ignorantly, so blindly, "I'm expected."

  Expected at the hospital tomorrow. Tomorrow! Shit, it was because she'd worn jeans to his office. She hadn't been respectful enough, in her sloppy sweater and silly red high-tops. Keds of deep brilliant red, so that with her green eyes she looked like a thin, tall leprechaun. When she was a little girl, she'd been stuffed into ruffly frocks for the periodic visits to the pediatrician. But big Dot, adult Dot, Dot on the brink of blindness, that Dot had been in a hurry, finishing up a fireplace edition of Hurricane Bay, complete with pines and sunset. Pulled off her paint-stained sweatshirt, noticed the time, said, "Oh, shit," and left on the dribbly jeans. While Dr. Maxwell shone light in her eyes, all she could think about was the brown paint on her knees, and would some of it rub off on his nice ivory slacks?

  As fucking ignorant as Eleanor Lance. Expected. Fuck.

  And lost now, lost worse, so lost she didn't even know if she could turn around and retrace her steps.

  And through the grim, grimy sky, the second-rate sun was blurring down behind a turquoise apartment building, and the broken Red Train bottle off her starboard bow turned gray. The dog whimpered again and trotted off. She reached out a hand to it as if it were a life ring. Two black men came out of a grocery store and looked at her. One whistled and said, "Hey, baby." Marching past, she stared without seeing. Old trick, new meaning.

  Off to see the wizard, off to see, oh, please, Mr. Wizard, if she only had some eyes. if she only had her sight. Screech screech screech she would do it. She would fucking really do it why not why the hell not. What was her life without brown paint, and cyan and tangerine and her good buddy, plain old daisy egg-yolk yellow?

  Tears formed again. She wondered if people without eyeballs cried. And if they did, did the tears go into the sockets? Did the tears slide down someplace in back of your cheeks? Did you swallow them behind your face? Or were the glass eyes like shields or bulwarks or dikes that prevented all that? Why hadn't she asked the doctor? She would have to call him this instant, call him up and ask him if she would be able to cry, because, because…

  because of the wonderful things tears do.

  Shit. If she found a phone, she should call a cab.

  And what was all that thick, rich, twenty-foot-deep bullshit anyway, about tumors and cancers and growths in her brain? If he wanted money that bad, why didn't he just do a hysterectomy—?

  Trade it in, yes; who needed children? Hell, how could a blind woman take care of a toddler, anyway? Hey, doc, take the ovaries and the fallopians and the hoo-hah units. Fill those dripping surgical gloves with squishy lady globs and keep the sockets loaded with cornea. Leave the eyes, oh please, oh, God, let's do some more tests now, right now.

  She walked off the curb, and a motorcycle almost hit her. The driver, in a silver baseball jacket and silver helmet, held a gas can in his lap that he waved at her as he yelled, "Watch it, bitch!" For a moment she was afraid he was going to slosh her with gasoline. But he revved his engine and sped around her.

  She exhaled, hard, moved on.

  Where was she? And as for more tests, who was she kidding? Dr. Maxwell was the end of the long, unwinding, daisy-egg yellow brick voyage to the bottom of the sea. He was her specialist's specialist's great-grand specialist. He was the last word in eyeball problems. Diseases. Fatalities. When he said cut, the surgeons excised up to their elbows. They drowned their arms in blood and loosened organs.

  A TV antenna pierced the sun's eye; black flowed over the horizon in inky clouds.

  And she was lost worse.

  And just as her heart began a major panic polka, and the fleeting thought—hell, if she did get mugged, maybe they'd have to postpone the surgery and they'd find a cure, a mixup in the lab results, St. X of the Eyeless would take pity on her and no way, no way did she want to be hurt tonight, because tomorrow afternoon, shed be hurting plenty–just as that thought flashed through her mind, something made her stop dead and turn her head.

  A flash lit up the sky. It burst soundlessly across the horizon, shot straight up into space, a brilliant, searing white. Light struck her like a slap, smashed into windows, vaporizing them, melting fences. Light, but no heat, bright and tinted yellow and white and a color that was no color but a sensation of intense, harsh, destruction.

  Dot cried
out and flung her hands over her face. She saw her finger bones. As her legs buckled and she sank to the sidewalk, she thought, the Big One. Surgery will be postponed because the Russians have just nuked the hospital. Thank God, thank God, thank–

  And then she screamed and shut her eyes tightly. Because, although it was impossible, the light intensified.

  Duck and cover. That was what they used to sing. Duck and cover. She bent over, covering the back of her neck, and sobbed.

  The Big One. Dear God, would it hurt? Would she sizzle or just evaporate? And then float above the blackened earth and the rubble, and glide down some tunnel—

  Walk toward the light. That's what happened next when you died, the white light, and someone who loved you, waiting. Some mystical white light.

  After a long time, she opened her eyes. Searing white, too bright for her to endure. She closed them again, hard. Okay, maybe dead. A good trick. An okay trick.

  Jesus, no! It was not okay. The screech screech screech was just a joke, all right? She'd thought about it because she was scared. Because it wasn't fair.

  She cried, tears bundling around her eyeballs and spilling down her face. Wasn't up to her anyway, was it? If she was dead, she was dead. Trade made. Done deal.

  What a load of crap, she thought, and opened her eyes.

  The night was pitch-black around her. Mars black, ivory black. It was so dark she couldn't even see her knees, her fingers, the cracks in sidewalk.

  She listened. No sound. She licked her lips and gingerly straightened back up.

  The peeling walls, the chain link fences, the dirty windows. Everything was gone.

  Or swathed in the night.

  Or she really was dead.

  Or else she had just gone blind, prematurely.

  "Oh, God," she moaned, and touched her eyes. Two round, big grapes. Still there. Her sigh of relief was a scream of protest, because tomorrow they would not be, and now that the game was over (what had it been, a factory explosion?) she understood that she had no choices.

  And then she saw the house.

  It loomed across the street, an immense, wooden Victorian of perhaps five stories. It was difficult to tell how tall it was; gingerbread gables poked at odd angles and heights. In perfect, new condition, it was painted white and beige and permanent green, and she could tell all this because the walls were packed with windows, like the dozens of little mirrors on a sixties-style purse or blouse from India. Each window blossomed with happy daisy-yellow light, and they were all exposed, without curtains or blinds.

  A round porch studded with carved posts grew larger as she got to her feet and walked toward it. Large green flower boxes of orange flowers hung from the railing.

  Dot reached out a hand and said softly, "Hello?"

  She heard a strange click behind her, almost a hiss, accompanied by a low, threatening voice that said, "Gimme your purse," at the exact same time that she looked through the oval glass in the center of the front door, and saw a man in a white terry cloth bathrobe raise an axe over his head.

  At his feet, a naked woman held her hands out in a pleading gesture.

  "God!" Dot shrieked.

  The woman brought her hands beneath her chin and doubled forward. The man arched his back, began the arc–

  "No!" Without thinking, Dot ran to the front door and pounded on it with her fists.

  The man froze. So did the woman. They posed like wax figures, the axe almost to her neck.

  Dot banged on the door. They did not move. She rattled the knob, kicked at the glass.

  They did not move.

  "Jesus!" Dot called. "Jesus!"

  She turned around, saw no one, heard a rustle in the bushes against the front of the house. "Hey!" she said, then remembered a sharp sense of danger, a voice, a hiss-click.

  She backed away, escaped to the porch.

  The woman screamed. There was a chunk–

  Dot ran the length of the porch, shrieking.

  The rowlets of windows sparkled, blurred. She searched through them for one large enough, looked in. A room painted mint green, with no furniture, no pictures, nothing. The floor gleamed, bare wood.

  Another scream. God, she had to do something. She had to help—

  What, go in there and be axed? Screech screech screech, the axe trick? Trade for that?

  Didn't matter. Wouldn't happen. Couldn't. She curled her fingers under the bottom rail and pushed. The lower sash moved easily, sliding upward without a sound. There was no screen.

  The woman screamed again. Dot swallowed hard and climbed into the house, into the bare room.

  Her feet made rapping noises on the floor as she ran toward the door; the sounds seemed out of sync with her steps. She glanced down, stumbled, and knocked her elbow against the wall.

  Chunk.

  Her breath came hard, hot. She wrapped her hand around the doorknob and bit her lower lip. Christ, what the hell was she doing?

  Eyeballing the situation.

  Chunk.

  She opened the door.

  The man stood on the other side. Someone had dropped a bucket of naphthol red paint over his head—

  Jesus, God, no, no, no—

  And his hand clutched the axe. Something pink and long and pulsing was wrapped around the business end.

  "Welcome to the eye of the storm," he said warmly.

  Dot yanked the door shut. He stopped it with his foot, grabbed the knob, grabbed Dot's wrist. His hand was sticky, viscous, strong.

  She tried to speak, to move, to do anything. He dragged her down the hall. The walls were covered with mirrors; she saw herself a hundred times, shambling behind the ghoul, the man who was smiling with red teeth and red lips.

  His eyes were washed with red. His eyes were filled with blood.

  Blood streamed down his cheeks like scarlet red tears. Dot swayed. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she felt herself going, going; she stopped herself, forced herself back into consciousness, and trailed behind him. She stared with horrible fascination at the axe. Was that the last thing she was going to see? The swipe of a blade? A true-life screech screech screech?

  "Oh, dear," she moaned, and it sounded so stupid, so banal, that she found herself dissolving into hysterical giggles.

  The man towed her around a corner. To port, a flight of stairs carpeted in sea green; to starboard–

  Dot threw up, all over her own forearm, as the man lowered the axe to the top of his bloody shoe and nodded with satisfaction.

  The woman lay at his feet. Her abdomen was sliced open, and everything lay strewn at her feet like jetsam on the beach.

  When she was finished vomiting, Dot stood trembling. Her mind raced, trying to think her way out of it. But it was too busy quarreling–this isn't real. Yes, it is. No. Yes–to be of much use.

  So Dot stood helplessly beside the man, certain that she was drowning in fear, because she couldn't breathe.

  "Why don't you try it?" the man said. He let go of her wrist and held out the axe. "Give it a good, hefty swing."

  She stared at him, unable to make sense of his words. He shook the axe.

  "Give it a go," he urged. He looked as though he'd been skinned—sticky red, even his hair, slicked down as if it had been painted on.

  "Nnnn," Dot said, and yet, and yet…Her mind flailed, splashed.

  Take the fucking axe, she thought at last, and bash his fucking head in.

  Wordlessly, she accepted the bloody weapon from him. She gripped the handle with both hands, blood sticking to her, took a breath–

  And then he stepped behind her and put his hands over hers as if he were teaching her to play golf. He smelled of blood; his arms were frigid. His bathrobe parted and his penis fit between her buttocks.

  "We'll do one together, okay?" he asked. His breath was fetid, the odor of rotted tissue.

  Bile rose in her throat. She heaved once, twice, had nothing more to throw up.

  "Please, I don't…I'm having an operation tomorrow," she blurted
out. "I have to get back."

  He laughed. "You don't want to go."

  "Yes, I mean…"

  "No, you don't want to. Because you'll die on the table."

  She jerked, tried to look at him. He captured the side of her head between his jaw and shoulder. "What are you–what?"

  "Your eyes have cancer in them," he said, "and they want to cut them out. But you'll die anyway. You'll die from the anesthetic."

  "How do you know?" She stared down at the woman, shut her eyes tight. His body was all around her. His penis nudged against her. She'd gone crazy, that was it. It started with the Bash. She'd gone crazy at the flash. Imagined the flash. Blinding light.

  The man gestured to the woman. "Go on. Climb in."

  Dot shook. The man let go of one of her hands and wrapped his arm around her waist. Blood smeared over Dot's blouse, straight across her abdomen, in the same place the woman had been butchered.

  "Make a trade?" the man whispered.

  Dot's head lolled back against his chest, her neck arched and exposed. With one clean whack, he could behead her, if he wanted.

  She swallowed hard. "Who are you?"

  "I think you know." His voice bubbled with amusement. "Cuz I know what you want."

  She shook her head.

  In another room, a window slid open. She heard the sound as clearly as the man's sigh of happiness. Heard footsteps on the bare floor.

  "I've got a gun!" a voice called, and it was the same voice that had murmured, "Gimme your purse," outside in the dark. "Hold on, lady! Keep fighting!"

  "Oh, Jesus." Dot's voice quavered as the man tightened his grip on the axe.

  "One for practice," he said, "and then you take care of the others. Then we can go in. If you want, we can eat her heart first." He nudged the dead woman with his shoe.

  The footsteps drew closer. "Lady, are you okay?" the other man shouted.

  "He isn't armed," the axe man assured her. He lifted Dot's limp arms above her head. The axe hovered above them both. Gore dripped onto the crown of Dot's head.

  Dot whimpered. "No, no, no–"