Who Is Rich?

It was a riot inside a women’s prison in Brazil that finally finished her off: murdered guards, the building in flames. Or maybe it was the town that was buried under a mudslide, or the time she rented a single-engine airplane to take her crew three hours across the dark ocean, to do a piece about an oil rig burning off the coast of Guayaquil. And stared out the window before takeoff as the man on the runway waved his arms at the pilot, pointed at the landing gear on their aircraft, and yelled, “You’re overloaded!” The pilot ignored him, waved goodbye, and gunned it. The man on the ground crew stepped back and made the sign of the cross, and then the pilot made the sign of the cross too as Robin sat there, silent, and the plane barely cleared the tops of trees and headed out to sea and couldn’t get any higher, buzzing a hundred feet over the ocean for the next three hours.

I think she felt guilty that she lived and Eddie died. I suppose her work had something to do with it. I think she went looking for death and found enough to cure her, although it took years, and in the meantime there was guilt, like for the little boy who cried on camera in his mudslide tableau. She wondered, Who owns the story? Who gets to decide? Was it right to shoot this scene, to take this piece for herself? Would we know anything at all if we didn’t traffic in the lives of strangers? Are we interconnected, or is it hit-and-run? Are your stories also my stories, or are we intact and alone? She came home and dumped out her guilt to me like dirty laundry, and those stories piled up on our floor and what was I supposed to do with them?

She took a Xanax and flipped off the lights and climbed into bed. Her body slim and hot and neatly packed, her ass so small and round you needed a magnifying glass to find it, so sweet and tight that gospel music should’ve been pouring out of it. We lay there and talked about Honduras, where she was headed next, or maybe the Kuwaitis wanted this refugee camp in the D.R., or the office in Bogotá that rented out equipment insisted on a police escort, and she had to call her guy down there in the morning to figure it out.

Was it her story or was it mine? Did I live only in support of her enrichment? Did my experiences matter? If she had only let me bop her, would I have passed out and forgotten the whole thing?

“When do you get back?”

“I have to check.” She got up and put another Xanax in the pill chopper and cursed when pieces bounced onto the floor, and got back in bed and placed the ice-cold bottoms of her feet against my shin.

“Oh my God, your feet!”

“Well, you’re like a stove.” A little more foot, almost ankle, rubbed against mine. The curves of her feet were stark and dramatic. I petted her hair gently. Her breathing changed. “I’m finally calming down.” She had problematically high arches that caused complicated injuries, exacerbated by running. “Thank you for loving me.” I would miss her and then forget her, and have to remember her all over again.

“There, there.” Sometimes, from stress, she’d get the hiccups.

“I can’t do it with you tonight.”

I made a soothing humming sound you might use on a baby. I’m sure I stroked her arm or touched her face. “Hey, what’s a few Xanax,” she’d say, sounding drunk, “compared to a heart attack?” I had to agree. I had to get used to having her around. Welcoming Robin back into my life was like rejoining a cult: special rules, rituals, foods, a certain way of speaking, figuring out what was permitted, how to avoid those actions now deemed wrong.

“Stop.”

I did. “Go to sleep.”

She turned and cranked the blankets around her and rolled away. “I call you from wherever I go, desperate to connect, and you have nothing to say, then I come home exhausted and you expect me to fuck you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t get you. You avoid me when I’m here, you sigh and stew, you’re nicer to the mailman than you are to me, and then when I have to leave you act sad.”

I liked the mailman and he liked me. Nice guy, dependable.

“Or, you get on the phone and start to cry, and say what’s the point, and try to dump me.”

“I thought you said you needed to sleep.”

“I’m working hard, I’m doing everything. I don’t know why we’re still together. Why are we trying to have a baby?” After a few minutes, in a clear, detached voice she’d say, “I’ve been holding on to the hope that if we have a child, this will have been worth it.” And then, interrupting the silence: “I have to let go of the hope that things will improve.”

She flung an arm over her head. I lay there, staring at her armpit, realizing that you could miss a thing but never want to see it again. You could hate something but still want to eat it.

She started making teeth-gnashing, sighing, snorting sounds of sleep. And while she slept, I began seeing the panels of an already finished comic, my own work, that didn’t actually exist yet. And over here a box with narration. And down below, in a wordless three-panel sequence, the guy on the tarmac making the sign of the cross, and then the pilot making the cross, and finally, the airplane’s cross-shaped shadow hovering just over the water, in a long rectangular panel, to indicate an extended period of time.

I could lie there pretending to sleep or go into the bathroom and jerk off into the sink. I stepped over her suitcase and went downstairs and took some notes about the story I’d just heard, making up any details I couldn’t remember, feeling like a scheming two-faced calculating fraud. I suppose now that it was some reaction to envy and disappointment, since her return didn’t include me in the bodily sense and her storytelling made me feel like her toilet. But it wasn’t just something to flush away, wasn’t just someone banging a suitcase around and then lights out. She saw a mudslide, a prison fire. I saw her watching, being moved by what she saw. Then I took those pieces and laid them out under a bright light and messed around with them, for weeks, months, and when I was done, I’d done it without anyone asking for it, ever vigilant, in my note taking, of the things that went on around me, a kind of misfit with delusions of grandeur and an overactive fantasy life, although in that case my vigilance led to a story about a young couple in the early years of marriage trying to have a baby, told from two points of view, one off the coast of Ecuador, one closer to home, with an unborn child, and God in the middle. I felt like some kind of predator.

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