Here where the sea has blown up mounds of rubbish and a flotsam of naked children, my lady crouches and spreads her fingers in the grime, spitting expertly between each pair of fingers. The kids crowd around curious, and she leaps at one and grabs him by the face. 'Is it your teeth? Is it it is your teeth! Lovely little teeth! This is how you oughta do it!' and I hand her a toothbrush and she shows the kids the right motions, then I hand round toothbrushes for them all.
When we got to the ice-cream shop my lady was tired and I ordered her a mango icecream. While we ate we looked out at the clouds rising in terraced palaces over the water and the orange sunset and I thought it was very good to look at. My lady looked at me and I didn't look back because I was ashamed. 'You need a haircut. I would be happy to do the job myself. I can picture myself standing behind you cutting your hair, running my hands over your head. Do you think I can cut hair?'
'Sure, why not?'
'Then give me a pair of scissors!' She was angry now. I found scissors in the first-aid kit in my backpack and she swallowed the rest of her ice-cream and took off her big coat and flexed. She was very beautiful.
She chopped my hair for a while until it was dark and then she leaned on my shoulders and rested her head against my head. We stayed like that for maybe a minute and I put my hand around my back to squeeze her shoulder. Felt good.
After that she put her coat back on and made me cut up lines of dexamphetamine on the table of the ice-cream shop. 'Have some, it's getting dark.'
'Sure.'
I don't like dexamphetamine much but it perked me up like a good coffee. My lady prescribed roaccutane for a middle age woman with skin problems. She tried to give us money but my lady said no. 'Of course not, of course not, taking money for this small service, it demeans and belittles us and denies our friendship... Our friendship is paramount.'
'My lady we need money to replace the roaccutane.'
'Annon we have come to a city where roaccutane grows on trees. Where there are trees...'
When we got back to Remedios Circle the dexamphetamine rush had worn off and there was just a pumping of blood in my ears like listening to seashells. My lady stopped to watch two men play chess on a bench. I tried to watch but I couldn't follow it. It seemed they moved the pieces wrong, always bending the rook's trajectory or curving the knight's path more than they should. The cars came by with big-headed pyromaniacs driving to the fireworks show or arranging their own fireworks. My lady laughed when the first explosion went off and a hooker tripped off her high heels.
We ended up in a hotel room on J. Nakpil. The old woman who let us into the room looked like a lizard and the young guard at the doorway had a wistful smile. When we got in the room my lady lay on the bed and looked at the fluorescent light with her eyes wide open. 'That young guard and that lizard are having sex, I think.'
'I'm pretty sure you're right,' I said. 'She was watching him watch you with a look in her eye.'
'Goddamn him! Stupid man should be happy with his lizard. We're not all so lucky.'
I washed my face and pulled out some of the platic bags of medicine from my backpack. I spread them out on the chest of drawers so the fan would blow on them and dry the damp from the pills. My lady took off her clothes and went to the bathroom. She crossed her arms when she was naked, that was how she walked. She came out and put antihistamine drops in her eyes, then found a different bottle of saline solution and dripped that in her eyes too. She sat down on the bed next to me. 'Annon?'
'Yes?'
'Do you know that there's a sign you can make over an open wound so that it will never close?'
'No.'
'That's what they did to me. They made the sign over me so it would never stop bleeding out of me. It won't stop.'
I didn't know what to say. She went into the bathroom and cut up some more lines of dexamphetamine. I lay in bed and listened to her snort seven lines, one after the other. When she came back she turned out the light and walked around the room for a long time, sniffing.
