THE GREY PLANE

The woman seemed unfocused and blurry while she sat at the coffeeshop.  We wouldn’t’ve even noticed her if she hadn’t talked to us.  But she did, so we remember her as a pretty woman.  There was discussion but eventual consensus that her hair was the off color between blond and brown that you could mistake as red but we didn’t, her dress was simple but well cut, mostly blacks and whites, a wide belt and her hair set tight against the top of her head, blending and tightening wrinkles until she looked like she’d been tossed through the wash, left to dry against quarters and the metroticket you forgot.

We’d decided all that after but there was no need to talk about how she came up to us and we’d never discussed it.  She was thin and loosely fleshed, warm wax on matchsticks, and had sat there for a long time.  We’d been there for hours ourselves, drinking our coffee and arguing agreements, our cigarettes confusing the night air into lazy grays in the heavy heat.  We’d been thinking of leaving, as we always did, and we ignored the morning school and the night job, lurking like submarine rocks when the sun hit the water too sharply, when she bumped against her table and stood, eyes bright against us.

She came up, fuzzy and wan and hit her hand on our table, called us sons of bitches what’s she done?  We all stopped, responding with the only silence we had.  She hit the table again and we jumped a bit.  “You don’t know, you don’t know and you’ve done it.”  “I haven’t done anything,” we protested, though we had.  We’d done plenty but nothing to this feminine blotch.  “She had nothing to do with you.”

“She was walking, she wanted you to understand.  I know, I know how to do it!  We used to do it before, to show you what we meant, but now you don’t and there’s nothing!  No matter how many times we pick up the tools, there they lay and you pick them up again, your house full and lit, cradles full from yanked out, the cellar is full of cans of nothing, each opened and full of nothing but the insides.  Kidney beans and oiled spleens, sliding over razor and for what?  You’re full of what?  You stepped on a baby and blamed a horse, we’ve done it too but we built and all you filled was tin, voices white in the darkness, parodying what you thought we wanted, entrance fees to the derected, a fence around the mud walls falling so deep you can’t see it and you call this us!”

We listened for a long time, waiting for the sense in this harangue but we were tired and it meant nothing to us.  We ignored her, waiting at first until it became genuine, and we took our cups in hands and changed the subjects around her strained shouts finding, when we forgot we didn’t notice her, that it was almost difficult to talk like this.  We remembered shrooms and later spoke of it but not all of us could agree, and the idea was left stillborn and reabsorbed, forgotten for the cartilage our muscles ate.  She sounded, we ventured, like she knew what she thought but didn’t know what she said.  The idea was agreed and we moved on.

She told us very many words without saying anything until she said Eloise Decamps, a name we never heard, we all agreed.  We heard this name mostly later, after she’d left and the moths took over, almost replicating her face in their pale flutters.  Eloise Decamps.  “After the moat, the spire reaching up and over through bricks and parting, slipping up and you left Eloise Decamps among roughage with her skin purple, told she wanted and needed filling.  Studied and left lackless you left her full and dry with nothing but her hazarded skin rough through and ruptured.”

When she left was nearly impossible to say.  She spoke and we ignored her and we talked about a lot of things, but most of them were as meaningless as what she was saying, if more interesting.  The paper cups stained and were replaced and the cigarette packets shuffled around the table.  The tables around us didn’t do anything to her, but they seeped away as the night sped along immeasurably.  The only way we ever knew the night was leaking away was the neon turning off when we miserably slunk off like beleaguered coyotes.

We had to investigate.  Words around the campus were scattered and scarce, so we didn’t stay long.  We tried various places about the city, but it was all shut and quieted, the long highways stretching towards luminous deserts, empty blacktop under spotlights.  The occasional gas station had little to do, the Keystone and Highlife signs peeling off toward the floor.  We cornered one man who seemed old enough to know what was going on without being untrustworthy.

“Jesus kids, I don’t know.  Hell I don’t even know how I ended up here.”  We nodded, sympathetic.  Gas stations accepted college degrees if they looked like GEDs.  “I’d never heard of Eloise Decamps.  She’s probably a college kid, like you guys.  If anyone knows her you do.”

We smoked with him in the gas station and he told us some things.  His clothes fit nicely, we all noticed, and he smoked studs.  His hands pushed back his hair the way water spreads over a swimmer’s cap.  “If anyone’s said anything about her, they haven’t said it to me.  I’m not the go to man.  But no one’s talked about Eloise Decamps while getting condoms or anything.  Soda and beer, those are the guys that talk.  They get cornnuts and soda or beer and jerky and those guys are the ones that talk.  Not the cigarettes.  No one with cigarettes.” We nodded and sat and knew he was right.  We smoked in thin spurts around the car with our arms like wet hair off our shoulders and he went back inside.  “You should ask a girl.”

We decided on Jessie’s and pulled out with the asphalt under our lights.  The lights on the road looked like dark static when we watched them and nothing else.  The night was cracked open like an egg from the inside.  We remembered that it felt like the cover had been peeled away, like we were looking at something shameful, and vast.  A naked old man scrutinizing his quivering stomach, veins pulsing like blue inchworms where we’d pulled away his scrabbling hands, is how we decided we had put it.

“It’s late,” Jessie told us but she was wearing jeans and her safety pins were still in her nose and ears, rusted from the night’s additions.  We agreed, leaning against the door and the porch.  We muttered with ourselves and wandered kicking at the bald tufts in the astroturf patio.  She stood still and said little.  Her face was painted white and we didn’t like seeing it, how it pinched up the minute geography of her face.  We didn’t like the way her eyes looked punched from the kohl.  She didn’t want to see us and hid behind the door. “I don’t know anything about Eloise Decamps.  I know her.  But. I don’t know what happened to her.  You shouldn’t be looking for her.”  She didn’t look at us but she was mad.  “She doesn’t mean anything to you is all I mean.  Why do you have to look for her?” We nudged a cigarette butt off the porch. “Guys.  There’s room on my floor.”  She spoke fast.  She looked mad but her eyes were very low. “I don’t know why you’re asking me about a girl who you don’t know.  A bag lady told you something that didn’t make any sense and you heard a name.  You heard her name but you don’t have to do anything.”  Jessie looked for something in our eyes and we told her we were going to find her.  She blushed against her green hair splayed against the air around her.  She didn’t find what she was looking for and her face crumpled.  It passed quickly as we watched whatever she was reasserted herself.  You should come, we told her. You’re not doing anything. She hesitated, then decided. “Then I’m coming.”

Jessie didn’t want to say where we were going and we didn’t know.  We laughed at eachother and spun lighters across the dashboard.  We went to a parking lot at an albertson’s and asked eachother about musicians and talked about how we’d never seen a pigeon’s nest and then argued about books.  The night spun so lazily it didn’t seem to move and the cottonwoods reached up from the fences to grab at them.  Jessie rubbed at her hands and pulled her knees up to her spiked collar.  We talked close to Jessie and far.  We all bought her coffee we decided.

We talked to Jessie and played at her like ivy against a smooth wall.  We asked her how she knew Eloise Decamps and she told us that she didn’t know her well.  She didn’t want to talk about her but she didn’t tell us that even though we all knew it.  She watched either our smoke or the stars.  “Eloise Decamps is smart.”  We laughed.  “She has classes with Ms. Lorde, and she likes her.  I think she’s single.”  Why did the woman know her, we asked?  “I don’t know.  I don’t know much about her.”  Why aren’t you telling us?  She curled in like a bloom in reverse.

“Eloise Decamps.  She is a girl who.  She likes force.”  We almost couldn’t hear her in her voice.  She sounded strange and we watched eachother to see what we thought but we didn’t know.  “Men think women want to be raped.  We don’t.  We don’t want cruelty.  Hurt.  We don’t want any attention.  It’s passion.  It’s that he cares that much.  The emotion is bigger than him.  Ourselves, our small selves in all this.  In all that everything that everyone.  He sees our small selves and the one grain in the beach.  The one number in the phone book and he can’t stop himself.  Whatever we have is manifest.  I think, anyway.”  You do? “No.  Not me.  They do though, I think.”  Maybe she’s not like that.  “Maybe.  But maybe,” she hadn’t looked and wouldn’t.  We walked in front and touched her knee or tried to give her a cigarette.  We don’t think she is, we said.  We don’t think women are like that we couldn’t rape anyone we told her and she didn’t say anything.

We put our arms around her and she pushed at us with her verdant hair until she told us we wouldn’t know anyway and we asked her what we wouldn’t know.  Jessie opened her mouth at us and we thought about the line of the powdered chin and the rounded lips she’d painted out.

We argued around her.  We got coffee and threw the empty cups at hydrants and geese.  We talked about leaving them stacked in front of cars and leaving a sign saying it was part of a documentary and to please not move their cars for 13 days and signing it “The city.”  We were tired and the neons were mostly out, remnants fizzling to nothing, the only lights that hummed about their colors too.

We later agree that Jessie had been acting weird the entire night.  She was usually docile, but not like this, this was an aberration, we concluded.  She was hunched like a vulture in the rain, all shoulders and green hair she wouldn’t put under her hood.  Jessie looked at us while we argued about whether it was our town or us and she told us it was us and to take her home.  We asked why.  We were frustrated.  We told her she wanted to go with us and she had to go with us to find Eloise Decamps.  We said we didn’t know what the woman said with the dusty road hair but it was horrible, we nodded to eachother, and now Jessie was telling us that Eloise Decamps was a rapee, and we just wanted to know what was going on.

“You don’t care about Eloise Decamps.”  She surprised us a little. “She doesn’t matter.  You’re bored.” Yes, we hit our noses with our fingers and shrugged and looked at eachother before nodding.  But you do, we decided.  “I know you guys.  Don’t be mean.  She doesn’t need you to be mean.”  We can be mean to you.  She sighed.  “You guys’re okay.  Just don’t be mean to her.  She doesn’t need it.”  Why?  She shook her head.  Why, Jessie, we asked.  You don’t mind talking about people.  You talk about people a lot most of the time.  You talked about Jack cheating on Claire, we remember.  You talk about Chris selling his brother’s motorcycle for coke.  You talk and now you don’t talk?  We all say this to her, crossing paths, pointing and smoking. We tossed accusations like paper airplanes, careless and pointed. You talked about Derek’s dad beating him when we all nodded as he talked about an errant baseball or a ladder catching his finger instead. We didn’t question a thing when you said Naomi was pregnant and we didn’t respond when you reported the sickly abortion that left her out of school for two weeks and we didn’t ask you which of the mammoth or spindly boys had left her with full cost. These were all you Jessie, we said in tightening circles, the cigarettes leaving tight vapor trails in the glyph. A lit cigarette passed her face, then an empty coffee cup. Our hand held her hair and we told her she said so many things people didn’t know what to believe from her. Some time she’d say something that people wouldn’t want said. We agreed this would be terrible.

Jessie heaved and burrowed until she finally hiccupped and dashed off the hood of the car. We watched her leave in disappointment and went after her with coos. She didn’t believe us, we knew, but we also knew it didn’t matter.

We whispered and teased her to the car. We told her we only said it ‘cause she was the way she was while the rest of us ignored her. She did not stop crying. “You guys have to take me home. There’s math. And I have to read.” “Shut up,” we said. “Oh come on, guys. She doesn’t need that,” we said. “Hey, I have to study too. We’re going to find Eloise Decamps,” we decided.

We headed west and stopped by a flashing red barrier across the street, loud and inappropriate in the industrial edges. The tracks disappeared between buildings and we heard the shuddering breath of the train rumbling somewhere. The city was set up on grids and forgot itself on the west end. Trains and old hospitals spent the wide night with a grey cloud and the occasional huddled cottonwood. It was out here that we’d run into everything that put us together like tufts of lint in linoleum hallways. We’d began as one of us when we would chase after nothing when there wasn’t any more coffee. The days were hot in the summer and very cold in the winter and we’d began to smoke mostly because the windows were always open.

The clanging didn’t stop and Jessie rustled in the back seat. “You guys always take me out too late. I hate it. Don’t pick me up anymore.” It was a better admission than we’d gotten all night. “You can’t go yet!” we told her. “Oh hell, guys we’re not going to find her.” “Maybe if we go to the campus. Or what, Pioneer’s Grove by the campus?” “What, like she’s a druid? That’s retarded. No one rapes druids.” “Like hell. My great grandpa was a druid rapist. It’s on our coat of arms.” “Oh man it’d be so sweet if we got there and she was just raping the shit out of, like, five huge dudes who were crying. Maybe it’s like a sorority thing” we agreed it was a hazing thing. “God,” said Jessie. She didn’t look like she would laugh. “Just go. It’s not coming. Just take me home.” We told her we could hear it. Maybe she had too much semen in her ears. Jessie didn’t smile and we said to knock it off but we didn’t know who. “Seriously, go. I don’t want. To be here. I’m tired, guys. Take me home.” We sighed, heavily. We looked at eachother and shook our heads, smiled. “You assholes.” Fine, we told her.

We reversed and pulled off the road and toward the tracks which turned into a grey and white blur of metal and lights as the car spun and a howling train snatched the front of the car, hurtling us back on to the road. It was loud and the whistle and the scream of metal twisted eachother up and lifted in the desert air. Blood came out of our hands which didn’t hurt and our nose burst across the window. Jessie screamed as one of her rings caught us in the lip, rupturing it like a dropped tomato. “Cops will come!” we coughed and the car hacked until it started, clattering with dropped wires scrambled at their lost parts.

Jessie whimpered and dabbed at our lip. We tried to kiss her and we all watched as she didn’t stop us. “Pioneer’s Grove. It’s too late,” she shook her head and the blood made her lips look swollen. “It’s just too late.” We flexed our hands, amazed at their strength. If you can move it, it isn’t broken. We dragged turn signals underneath the car, winding towards the grove in the perpetual. Our darkened eyebrows told eachother not to complain.

We kissed her again and we stared. We both kissed her on both sides and hands appeared. “Knock it off,” we said again and we didn’t. “You need to stop,” she cried and didn’t stop. We didn’t do anything.

The car seemed to move without us driving until the grove appeared and we parked. We pulled Jessie with us and sat in the grove, waiting for Eloise Decamps or the sun, whichever came into our hands first. “You need to stop,” she told us. What happened to her, we asked?

“She came here. She came here and got raped. It was some boys. I don’t know who.” How do you know? We thought she was lying, we confided to her. “I don’t know.” We smoked with the quiet stars and agreed that the woman couldn’t know about it but we asked Jessie. We pulled her close to us while we walked around the grove, sitting on the car smoking. We needed more cigarettes soon.

“I don’t know.” We always liked you, Jessie, we told her. We always liked you a lot. We like that your hair is green and that you have blood on your lips. “No,” she told us. Who knocked up Naomi? Who beats his girlfriend and who asked his girlfriend to sodomize him? “I don’t.” You do know. “I don’t I won’t say.” Who? “I won’t say anything.”

Jessie limped when we dropped her off, and her house sat in the just turning night, the thin blue reminding us of work and school. We agreed that Jessie would be fine and may have enjoyed it since it was fun. And besides, it was just nothing. It was just the city, we agreed, the city pushing its openness, the long, wide night, pulling on us toward, toward something. That’s where we lost it.

The sun peaked, and we scratched our bruised hands and dropped ourselves off, the morning drifting up like dust on a road.