“Once something’s happened, it’s happened for all time. These things don’t just go away. You’re a very voluptuous young woman. What are you doing walking the streets alone?”
Swanny blinks rapidly, refocusing her attention to the inside of the limo, where Sharkey might be exuding an ectenic force on the rhythm of her heart.
“I’m exploring,” murmurs Swanny.
“You’re a long way from Wonland County.”
“How do you know I’m from Wonland?”
“Maybe you haven’t heard my name. But I’ve heard yours.”
“How…?”
“Ain’t your ma some kind of boss?”
Reflexively, Swanny touches the EAT SHIT & DIE pin on her lapel; beneath her fingers, the diamonds feel like an irregular scab covering a recent injury.
“Whassa matter, did you run away from home?”
“My mother is dead,” Swanny says. It doesn’t seem fair that she always has to tell everyone. She feels obscurely disgraced, the object of a bon mot from some timeworn farce: To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. “I’m an orphan, you see.”
“That’s a shame. Must’ve been some real pros, took her out.”
“They weren’t ‘pros,’ either in terms of professionalism or in the colloquial sense of the word. They were torchies.”
“Torchies?” Sharkey looks amused. “That what you call ’em?”
“Prison colony escapees, if you prefer.”
“I always liked ‘untorchables,’ myself. ’Course, that only applies to them that live.”
“I saw her die,” says Swanny. “She was gunned down in front of me, in my husband’s house.”
“You see the guys who did it?”
“No…I couldn’t…”
“Good. Some faces ain’t worth the mental space.”
“I didn’t see them because I ran away,” Swanny confesses. She stares into the teacup. “I was unarmed. Defenseless. But I won’t make the same mistake again.”
“You won’t, huh?”
“I intend to get revenge.”
Sharkey lazes back on the banquette. He sucks saliva through his teeth. His eyes are coals, black but still burning inside. “I had a dream I was gonna meet somebody like you today. Not a dream, exactly. A premonition.”
“What did it foretell?”
“That I’d meet a woman who knows what she wants. And I’d help her get it.”
* * *
Pippi had a great fear of general anesthetic, so she always opted for the local when the surgery would permit it. The thing that frightened her most, she once confided to Swanny, wasn’t actually death but the lack of awareness, the yawning swoon of the soporific into her blood, and then the moment when things were being done to her body that she could not control, things that might be done wrong. Unconsciousness: it was a curious fear for a petite woman who put away half a liter of gin or vodka nightly. But Pippi reigned over herself even then, brooding before the fireplace, wrapped tightly in a stylish shawl as she gripped the stem of her martini glass like a hard-won scepter. She never dozed off on the couch, or in the bath, at least to Swanny’s knowledge. And only when Swanny was sick did Pippi decline to tuck her in. Every other night, without fail, she would appear in Swanny’s doorway at the appointed hour, framed in the darkness of the hall, and pause with her finger on the switch.
“Say your prayers,” she would intone just before lights-off, and in their godless house, the words had the menacing ring of a femme fatale’s.
But unlike her mother, Swanny craves oblivion—she always has. Food or drink, sobs or laughter, the ultimate end of any bodily sensation is that aching fall, back into the bottomless liquid depths of the ocean from which all consciousness rises. She’s having trouble following what Sharkey says. It’s so sleepy in here.
“I don’t understand,” she tells him, finishing yet another cup of tea. She couldn’t be relied upon to count how many she’s had. “You came from the prison colony? But I thought no one was permitted to enter or leave.”
“I don’t ask permission. I go where I like.”
“So you’re an inmate?”
“I’m a native. I was born there. What’s the crime in that?”
“I apologize if my tone seemed accusatory. But it’s always been my understanding that the corrupting influence of the locale bends everyone’s nature toward its cruelest ends.”
“I hear Wonland County’s got a lot of snobs.”
“What is it that you do in Torchtown, Mr. Sharkey?”
“I run a little shop down there.”
“And you’re suggesting you can help me find my mother’s killers?”
“I can get you close. If you come and work for me.”
“In the shop?”
“In the shop.”
Swanny can imagine stepping out of the limo, meandering through the empty streets again. She can’t imagine summoning the energy. “I suppose I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“One thing first.” Sharkey spits into his empty teacup, sets it aside. “Lemme see your teeth.”
Swanny feels the same flash of panic as if he’d pressed a pistol to her temple, as if he’d told her to remove her clothes. The tips of her fingers go cold. The gum around her newest tooth pulses. Her diagnosis has followed her here. “Excuse me, what?”
“Show me your teeth.”
“Why?”
“You got something to hide? Open up.”
As she submits to the examination, Swanny thinks of her old dentist: his gloved fingers massaged her gingiva, worked clove-drenched gauze into sockets charged with pain; with his tiny mirrors, he saw parts of her she’s never even glimpsed herself. It isn’t the first time her jaw’s laid bare. Yet there’s no comparing the situations. By nature of his work, the dentist was a strange, parasitical creature who found his living in her mouth. In this act, she’s applying to become Sharkey’s.
“Wider. Pull back your cheek, lemme see on the side. Yeah. Other side.” Sharkey places his thumb on her lower incisors and eases them downward; she feels her temporomandibular joint click, another point of dysfunction. “You chew?”
It sounds so much like a transcribed sneeze, for a moment Swanny doesn’t understand what he’s asking.
“Do I…?”
“You chew?”
“I don’t take my meals through an intravenous drip, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Cute. But you know what I’m talking about.”
Swanny slides her own finger into her mouth, almost involuntarily, checking to make sure everything is still there.
“You know what I do,” says Sharkey. His own teeth are dark, wet stones in the cave of his mouth. For the first time, she notices the smell of his breath: chemical but strangely pleasant. Intoxicating.
“I suppose you’re a chawmonger,” she hears herself say. “And you want to know if I’m an addict.”
“That’s right.”
Swanny yawns, longer and deeper than she can ever remember doing before. Corona used to say that a yawn meant one’s soul was trying to escape from one’s body. But Swanny’s isn’t going anywhere. “Forgive me. I’m afraid this has been a very long, very strange day.”
“Forget about it.”
“I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“You can shut your eyes.”