Novellas as they happen

The full title of this book is, in the spirit of the late and greatest Kurt Vonnegut, Blue Hoodie and The Pretty Girl Theorem or It’s Tuesday! That is because this story is 100% about Tuesday, the main character and where she’s at in life, emotionally, spiritually, physically. The works. In fact, it’s whole plot is intentionally misleading, but you’re going to have to hang around to figure out just how.There’s a guy going around Tuesday’s city sneaking into women’s bedrooms and watching them sleep. He never hurts them. If they wake up, he just walks away, but it’s creepy and women are freaking out. Tuesday is a trust fund baby hit by a serious malaise, and she decides to set out and find this guy to give a little more shape to her life.The guy watching women sleep was a story making it’s way around my campus when I was in college. It always sort of grabbed me as a creepy image. I don’t think it was true, but who knows? Anyway, there’s a reason why urban legends never quite die, so I used this one to ground this book, my fourth effort at The International 3-Day Novel Contest. I think it’s my best effort and hopefully the present re-working improves it even more.That’s enough background to get you started on The Pretty Girl Theorem. Tuesday is almost certainly going to offend you, but stick with her. She’s interesting underneath all her nonsense. I love her. She’s got a lot of energy.

Wow, I thought to myself, I’m covered in garbage. That sucks. It’s not like getting all smelly will make me any smarter. But, then, how would I know what will make me smarter? Wait, was I supposed to get smarter or deeper? What is the difference? Anyway, I was fine. Grossed out but fine.

And, I hadn’t even done any coke, that’s the thing. How’s shit like this happen when you haven’t been doing coke? You wouldn’t think a girl like me would end up in a dumpster unless she were on something. So that’s really how the last three days started and got so crazy: with me falling in a dumpster.

Once I crawled out of the dumpster, I got out my Nokia and called this girl I knew who lived nearby. I wanted to get cleaned up at her place and maybe borrow some clothes. Thank God I wasn’t out here dressing fancy. Just a denim skirt and one of my old “Porn Star” girly t’s under this jacket I sort of liked, Adidas with yellow stripes on dark green.

Her phone rang and my homegirl was home. Her name was Lindsey.

“It’s Tuesday,” I said, when Lindsey answered.

“No, it’s not, it’s Friday!” she said, with a laugh. Everyone that knew me thought this joke was really funny. Eventually, I just got in the habit of calling up people and saying ‘It’s Tuesday’ because no one ever got tired of saying, “No it’s not – it’s Wednesday!” It’s gotten to the point where I don’t want to call people on Tuesdays because you can hear the disappointment in their voices.

I asked Lindsey if I could come up to her place and get cleaned up. She said yes but that she was getting ready to go out to a party at this hotel that some big fundraiser was giving. Then, as soon as she said it, she wanted me to come. She said there would be lots of rich guys. I said I didn’t want to go and she started fighting with me about it so I asked if I was going to make her late (hint, hint) but she told me not to worry and then kept fighting me about whether or not I would go to this party. I was not about to go to a party in a “Porn ” tee. Thank God that Lindsey is at least two sizes bigger than me because there is no way that I would have been able to get away from her if I could have borrowed her party clothes.
 
She babbled and babbled about all the people who were going to be there and I said, “uh-huh, uh-huh.” Really, I tuned her out trying to replay in my head how I had fallen into a garbage dumpster. It’s been said that I can be a bit compulsive. Wait, impulsive? Shit. Which one is which? You decide, you know? We’re going to be here a while. No, don’t explain which is which. I don’t care. It’s not like I’d trust you to teach me anything anyway.
 
So, I was saying. Lindsey could really go on and on, but I just started making my way up to her place.  I didn’t care if I made her late. No one would care if she came or when. Lindsey just had a lot of money and some sort of important job. That, and she went out every night of the week and then some. Anyway, all they wanted from her was a check, and they’d gotten that.

Grimm says that everyone who goes out every night of the week is desperate for people to like them. Grimm says that even though people think that the ones that get laid are “fun” and the ones that don’t are “desperate,” it’s all a lot of crap. They’re both desperate. That’s Grimm for you.

Lindsey and I were still talking on the phone when I got to the door of her row house. She opened up the door and said, “I think it would be so funny if we kept talking to each other on our phones while you’re here!” She made the ‘BEST idea – ohmigod’ face. I hung up my phone.

“Thanks, sweetie, for having me.”

“What happened to you? God, Tuesday!”

“Bad luck. Bad luck.”

“Did you go to some sort of party for homeless people or something?”

“Ha, ha,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek. Well, really, I was pushing my way into her place. I was just doing it agreeably.

“Can I shower up and borrow some clothes?” I asked.

“I don’t know if mine will suit you.” Lindsey had really big boobs and I really, really don’t. That’s about the only thing I really liked about Lindsey. She had great boobs. I appreciated the fact that I could always count on her for help, but that didn’t make me like her. Her boobs, though, I liked. She had big, big boobs. Don’t get that kinky smirk on your face, though. It’s not like that.

I told her, “I just mean, like, a gym shirt and sweats or something. I’m not going out.”

“It looks like you were out already,” Lindsey said.

I smiled at her nicely - the dumb broad. This is what separates the girls from the ladies, you know? She honestly thinks that any old skirt and any old fitted tee is outfit enough to be seen in in See-Me Land. God. A lady would have been able to tell that I reached way back in the clothing archives to grab this number. Lindsey is a social climber without any pitons.

Previously, Tuesday crawls out of a dumpster and goes to her friend Lindsey’s for a shower and change of clothes.__________________ 

When I got done with my shower, I found her stretchy gym shirt out and a pair of really cute pink gym pants, both folded, on her bed. She also had a cup of tea for me. Chamomile. Very sweet. Lindsey knows enough to know that anyone is going to want a little soothing when they show up at somebody’s place covered in garbage.

I sort of suspected that the tea was her way of trying to get me to hang out a little longer so maybe I’d become her buddy and maybe I’d change my mind and maybe I’d come out with her. No question that Lindsey would have a much better time if she got to hang out with me. Some people find parties and others bring them along, know what I mean?

You probably don’t.

I’m over it.

Tea sounded good, though, so I sat there with one of her towels wrapped around me and one of them up around my hair. She had put just a tiny bit of honey and lemon in it, too. Very nice. I felt snugly. Made me wish I had a sore throat.

“I have to ask you again how you ended up covered in garbage, Tuesday.”

I smiled at her.

“C’mon.”

I smiled again.

She shrugged.

I said, “It’s hard for me to explain.”

“Set the scene for me.” She was doing her make up and looking at me in her mirror.

“I had heard about something that happened in this one building. Something weird. I was just out walking around and, I don’t know… ever feel like you just need everything in you to settle down some? I didn’t even plan it, but I was up alongside this alley behind the building where it had happened. Half-a-second more and I would never have realized I was there, but then I happened to notice the name of the alley and I turned back and saw the address of the building and it hit me.

“This was it.

“So then I had to go into the alley and start looking around and see if I could get some sort of idea. Pretty soon I was up on top of the lip of a dumpster, and I didn’t even know why I got up there, but then I was inside it.” I got the chills saying it. Did I shake right now? I think I might have shaken right now, too.

It was gross. Really. I mean, I don’t think of myself as a superficial person. Okay, right, these days I don’t. Right. But whatever way you cut it – it’s gross getting covered in garbage. This was the dumpster for a restaurant, too. Higher end and all, but their garbage is still garbage and it’s mostly food.

“What happened in this building?” Lindsey asked me.

“I think it happened. I heard it did.”

“What did you hear?”

“This guy. He showed up in this girl’s room while she was asleep. She woke up and opened her eyes and saw this guy in the corner of her room watching her sleep.”

“Did he touch her?”

“He wasn’t even in arm’s reach.”

“He was just watching her?”

“Just watching. It was like almost four a.m.”

“What did he do?”

“When he saw her wake up and look at him, he turned around and walked out her front door.”

Lindsey looked at me as if I were the person who was going into people’s houses watching them sleep. I wanted to be like, “Hey, it’s a guy? Okay.” But I didn’t, because I don’t lose my cool in front of those beneath me. Not unless they are really, really far beneath me, because then it scares the hell out of them and that’s funny. Like you. If I just met you somewhere or if you worked for me or something I’d spazz out in front of you just to say hello. You’d piss yourself. I might do it yet so shut the fuck up or you’ll really see it.

Once she’d sort of taken it in, Lindsey said, “That’s so fucked up.”

“I know.”

“Can you imagine?”

“I’ve been trying to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“So… like… you were…”

“I think I was trying to figure out how he got up to her apartment. It’s not the only time I’ve heard about this guy.”

“Do you know which apartment it was?”

“I don’t even know if it really happened.”

Lindsey thought about it. She looked back at her vanity and decided she had done her face pretty well. She got up and walked to her dresser, picked up her brush and started running it through her hair. She did it all with a show of distraction, so I’d know what she was really doing was thinking about this dude. Get ready for her big conclusion: she said, “If it happened to you… I mean, you might not even know if it happened, you know? I mean, what if he did it and you didn’t catch him?”

I nodded. “I also wonder if any girls saw him but thought it was a dream,” I had gone through all this already. I used to think that you wouldn’t go back to sleep, but then I woke up in the middle of the night with a dream that it had happened to me. I had seen him in my room, staring at me from inside his blue hoodie, but when I shot up in bed and my eyes came open and he definitely wasn’t there. I was wide, wide awake. But I also got back to sleep pretty quick.

In the morning this guy who’d slept with me asked if I always got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I told him that I hadn’t gone to the bathroom, I’d just had a bad dream. He told me that no, in fact, I had gone to the bathroom. He had watched me. I didn’t remember doing it. He swore I had. Weird thing to argue about, but it made me think about consciousness and the edge of sleep.

Did I just say that? Consciousness and the edge of sleep. Damn. I’m getting somewhere, I don’t know where, but somewhere.

Lindsey stopped brushing her hair and asked, “Do you think maybe he beats off when the girls don’t wake up?”

“I don’t think so. Too risky,” I said.

She said, “One time I dreamed that my alarm had gone off. I had gotten to the bathroom and washed my face and everything. Then I came back to my room and it was 4 AM.”

“That would be great.”

“Except now every time the alarm goes off I hope maybe I’m dreaming it but I never am. It only happened once.”

The tea had gotten cool enough that I could finish it pretty quickly. I drank it down fast and let its herby warmness get into me. I thought about what it tasted and felt like as I finished it off. Grimm said that this is the kind of thing I need to do. I’d asked her what the hell it meant when people say that you can’t see the forest for the trees. She said that it’s like a person who shows up at your place because he knows that his buddy will be there even though no one else likes him at all.

I still really don’t understand it, but she said I should start trying to take the world in more slowly, so that I can get the big picture and the small picture. I asked what she meant by that, and she said, “Well, for example, if you have a cup of coffee, try to taste it and smell it as you drink it.” I told her that you can’t help but taste coffee and she asked me if I really tasted every cup? Right, right, I said.

Whatever.

But, I’m trying. So, I drank my chamomile tea with honey and lemon in Lindsey’s apartment and tried to think about it. What’s the honey? What’s the water? What’s the tea? What’s the lemon?

I told Grimm I’d give her three months of taking her advice all I could. I figure I have six weeks left so I might as well take my time with what Grimm had to say. She looked pretty confident that she could get me sorted out.

“Am I keeping you?” I asked Lindsey.

“Oh, who cares,” she said, and it was the first thing she had said that struck me as sincere since I got there. I started changing anyway. I took the towels off and shrugged into her workout top and her gym pants. I asked her what shoe size she was and it turns out we’re about the same. I asked if I could borrow some flip-flops because I had been wearing clogs and they would look stupid with athletic pants. Lindsey had lots and lots of flip flops, and she tried to get me to take a pair of her nice ones, but I took one of the older pairs that matched. She put my clothes and my shoes in a little garbage bag so I wouldn’t have to smell them and she tried to drive me home.

I said I wanted to walk back. I wanted to do more thinking. She did not try to hide her surprise. ‘Look, bitch, I’m deep.’ That’s what I wanted to say. Grimm says I’ll be lucky if anyone ever thinks I’m really deep, but I’d better fucking try to get there anyway.

All positive reinforcement with that one.

Just out of curiosity, Lindsey asked me which building I had heard the guy had gone into. I told her. She said she knew a girl who lived there. It was a small apartment building. Maybe 20 or 30 places in it. I made her tell me the girl’s name and give me her number.

“You’re being weird,” Lindsey said, copying her friend’s information down.

“It’s a very interesting feeling.” I said.

Previously, Tuesday and Lindsey speculated on what the fellow who watches women sleep might be doing when they don’t wake up as Tuesday tries to explain why she tried to climb the outside of a building.

Shut up.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

I said shut it.

You asked how a chick like me could pin down a thug like you, right? You wanted a goddamn explanation for how you ended up here, and so I’m giving it to you, but you didn’t see me ask for any feedback, did you? No. You didn’t. Shut up and listen.

I need coffee. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. And I don’t want a cigarette.

It will probably surprise you to learn that I don’t smoke. I never have. Done all the other uppers, but I’ve never smoked. Cigarettes make your teeth yellow and your breath bad and they take too much time anyway. What good are they? You get this vague little buzz for half a second and after that all you want to do is have a cigarette every fifteen minutes. It’s a stupid drug for stupid people.

I went home from Lindsey’s, took three Xanaxes and slept for sixteen hours. When I woke up, I called Grimm and she told me to get out of my apartment. I asked her what she thought I should do and she said that I absolutely should not do any more drugs. I asked her why and she said they make me stupider. She said they make me ‘redress.’ I told her they do not. In fact, I took all my clothes off after I popped the Xanax. She groaned and said she didn’t want to talk about it and ordered me to get out of the house.

She also said I should not look for anyone to party with. I asked her if she thought I should get back on the case. She said she did not give a damn about the case.

My ex-boyfriend is never home you know? When we were together, he was never home. You could never find him. He found you. That’s how he liked it.  The nice thing about this is that I could go over to his place all the time and he wouldn’t run into me and freak out because I’d come over. He wouldn’t be there. You could count on it. It’s nice to know someone you can count on, you know?

Whenever I couldn’t figure out what to do, I went over to my ex-boyfriend’s house, which is what I started thinking about doing after waking up. It took a little while to get there if I walked, but I would just snag a cab if I was in some sort of hurry. After talking to Grimm, I gave myself my little pep chant. I sat on the edge of my bed and rocked back and forth saying, “Be brilliant, be unbreakable. Be brilliant, be unbreakable. Be brilliant, be unbreakable.”

“If you believe it you’ll see it.” That’s what Grimm says all the time. I was trying to believe I could find something to believe in, which is pretty heady. Grimm called it meta-something or metro-something. I don’t know. All I knew was that I need to stay focused on getting out there and finding myself.

I had a rare level of insight for a girl like me, see. That’s what I had going for me. Imagine Paris Hilton waking up one day and saying, “Oh my God. I am not even really a person! If I don’t get my shit figured out I’m going to end up wiry and used up in a detox center somewhere or the wife of some dirty old widower with a ‘Vette.” Imagine if Paris had that kind of self-awareness, you know? It doesn’t happen with girls like her. Only, it happened with me. One day, I swung Prada handbags and snorted lines at the after-bar. The next day I was pounding pavement and finding myself. Becoming someone. No fucking around.

No Deepak Chopra searching for me, either. I was doing this Urban-Buddha style. Grimm says that when you’ve got less to work with, you just need to work harder. Like I said, Grimm wasn’t the nicest person on Earth, but she was smart and cared enough to be really honest with me.  So, I totally slap my proverbial balls up against the proverbial wall to follow her advice. It’s that or swallow a bullet, right?

Not so long ago, I’d give almost any guy a blowjob if he told me that he saw something special in me. I never even asked them what it was. It hurt too bad to see the uncertainty in their faces. I mean, not everything gets past me, you know? I would just smile and kiss them and ask them to go for a walk and pretty soon and have it in my mouth. Why not? I knew that if I made them sit somewhere and listen to me we’d both end up bored and I’d give him head anyway.

I’d do this for some guys. A lot of guys. You would not have been one of them. No way.

Previously, Tuesday wakes up from a drugged out stupor and Grimm tells her to get up and get out of the house. So she goes to her ex’s place because she knows he won’t be there.

Anyway, like I said: Grimm had told me to leave. I left. I left right at 5 PM. We were in a nice part of the summer, so the light would be out a lot longer. A cab showed up, I got in and chatted up the driver. Cabbies, especially day cabbies, always like to talk with me. They think I’m cute. They always have a lot of opinions because they hear so many in their yellow consultancies on wheels.

I used to go back and forth about whether I wanted to talk to cabbies. Alone, I might. If I got in with one person, especially a guy, I seldom did, but in groups of friends I couldn’t wait to start chatting up the cabby. Weird, huh?

This is not, by the way, the sort of thing I would have even realized about myself until Grimm suggested I try thinking about things I had done and how I had behaved differently when I was with different people. That didn’t work because I had trouble remembering all that many things. I went back to her and told her that, and she shrugged.

She told me to try visiting places where I have done things.

I said I’ve partied all over the city.

Grimm said. “God, what the fuck does that matter? Do you make excuses about tying your shoes, too?” That made me smile. And pretty soon I was leaving my apartment at 8 o’clock at night and walking around to different places until midnight or one. Just looking in and remembering. I would get pretty far away from my house, but I always had cab fare to get back. I went through a lot of Evian doing that shit. I used to try bringing water, but I went through it too fast. People will give you attitude about filling up a water bottle, so I just bought more at the gas stations. Fucking Evian. ‘From a spring in the Swiss Alps.’ Right. My friend and I have springs like that too. We call them ‘faucets.’

The cabbie that took me to my ex-boyfriend’s place looked like an Arab. He might have been Indian, too. When they’re like, over 40 or 50, I can’t really tell the difference. They get fat and you can’t tell. He was a philosopher, though. I asked him if he had heard the story about the guy who goes into women’s bedrooms and watches them sleep.

“No, no, no. I have never heard of such awful things,” he said.

“Really,” I asked him, “I thought you cabbies heard about all sorts of weird stuff when you’re driving around the city.”

“These things, they are not weird. They are common, these things of which you speak. These people, they have obsessions. It is obsessions with the devil that they have, and, in this way, they are all the same. They are small, simple obsessions of no interest to me. I ask them to talk of their hearts rather than their groins.”

I laughed. “What do people tell you when you ask them to talk from their heart and not from their groin?”

The cabbie shrugged. “They usually laugh like you. This is okay. Laughter is of the heart, I am think.”

I thought about that for a little bit. I was trying to focus in on observations people made and see if I could learn anything from them. After thinking about it, I had to ask him, “But don’t you think that people laugh about a lot of really mean things?”

“Yes, yes. Who says the heart has only kindness? Very well. I believe laughter is of the heart. I know because children laugh so much. Children are all heart, no groin, and so I know.”

I laughed at that because I could feel him.

“Did this man who watches women sleep watch you sleep?” he asked, and I told him that he hadn’t. I said I had just heard the story a lot. “Where is it that you’ve heard these stories?”

“From my friends. Well, people I meet, anyway?”

“Where are the places that you have met these people?” he asked.

“Bars. Parties. Restaurants. I don’t know. Out.”

“Out where?” What a weird question? I listed a bunch of the places I’d been to for him. He looked at me and furrowed his brow as I said them. He nodded as I finished and thought for a second. He said, “These places, these are not places where people say things because they are true.”

My ex-boyfriend is one of those uber-wealthy guys. It’s really disgusting, but he has a day job, anyway. He has this crappy little job as a social worker in a prison. I know, could you just vomit in admiration? He comes from money so old that it started stacking up before people even really used money. He’s from one of those anciently rich French families that owned ungodly amounts of land and still do. They came over here and bought other ungodly amounts of land at some point, then they started buying ungodly amounts of stocks and buying ungodly amounts of sports cars. Then someone begat this little Jesus and I did him in ungodly ways.

This one had some sort of recessive gene for conscience come out, so he likes to pretend that he is not fabulously wealthy and work as a social worker for 50 hours a week and then hits the town all night. You think he’s partying, but he is actually working on other rich people to give their  money to stuff he thinks important.

He is also cripplingly hot. He has a weakness for women, though. That’s his vice. He drinks a little. Does a little drugs if he feels like he has to. Parties a little. It’s all part of his act, and everyone knows it. A nice ass, though? A nice ass can definitely distract him. Everyone also knows this.

His name is Quentin, by the way. Quentin. I know, seriously, right? If you saw him, though, it’s totally hot. It’s like a bow tie on a tall skinny boy. You don’t want to admit that it’s hot, but it totally is. He doesn’t wear glasses or bow ties. In fact, he dresses like something out of an Autumn Gucci ad, so then you meet him and he says “My name is Quentin” and your nips crinkle up. You don’t even know why but you replay it in your head and you’re like, “Quentin… Quentin… Quentin…”

Mmmm…

It’s hard to say how long Quentin and I dated, because he never exactly broke up with me. That bastard. It was one of those things where I just sort of saw him less and less. We hooked up a few times at a few parties, then he finally took me back to his place to spend the night. Well, then it was like I had never touched him before. The first couple times had been perfectly fun, not a waste of time or anything. Then he gets me back to his place and we go on this multi-room romping that involves water and smoke and special oils he has hid all over everywhere and I’m just like – how did that even happen? Were there robots helping that I didn’t see? I don’t know. Can we do it again?

Call me, ‘kay?

He said I should come back by any time I wanted. That’s about as close as I ever got to a commitment, I guess. What would happen is that I would come by and his assistant, the one who lived at his house with him, would call him and eventually he would show up. I could wait as long as I wanted. At first I would wait a few hours. Then I was waiting a day to see him for while. Then I started getting told that maybe I should come back, but he would name a time and then he would be there when I came back. Three or four days later.

Then I just started to get these vague answers. One time I waited for him for two days and he never showed. Grimm says that was maybe the dumbest thing I have ever done, but I don’t know. After that, I would tell his assistant just to call me at my place when he got back. So that worked for like a week, and sometimes he would call pretty quickly.

Then he just didn’t call. Bet you saw that coming, huh?

These days when I get confused and go over there, I’m pretty sure that his assistant calls out to tell him that he shouldn’t come home because I’m there. I don’t care, though. When I go over there I have access to his stereo, his booze and to his assistant. Quentin’s assistant is this little kung-fu master from Brooklyn. He’s not Asian. He’s like from one of those Brooklyn Teamster families with a dad that’s driven a UPS truck since the first days. This kid got obsessed with kung fu movies young, and then he became a kung fu’er himself. Now he works for Quentin because he can serve as a bodyguard, sort of, but also because the work fits really well with the Buddhist underpinnings of his fighting style. And Quentin has this huge gym in his place where his butler practices all day after his work is done.

I can watch him work out forever. He doesn’t mind. He likes me. He likes me because I don’t ever talk to him. I just let him talk to me. Or I let him practice and I watch. I don’t think he gets a lot of attention from women even though he’s pretty cute and in amazing shape. It doesn’t matter. Whenever he’s out, he’s with the hottest man in the Northeast part of the city.

That bastard Quentin’s housekeeper’s name is Eric. Plain old Eric. Eric can do a handstand with only one arm and he can catch an arrow in mid-flight. Not right in front of his chest like Mr. Miyagi in The Next Karate Kid or anything, but he can still catch it.

I knocked on the door and Eric answered it more quickly than usual. He had on his workout pants (Nike – Tai Chi doesn’t have its own apparel yet), with a really crappy t-shirt on. He doesn’t actually wear a t-shirt when he works out. He usually does it shirtless, which is nice since his skin is absolutely stretched over these perfect muscles. Watching him work out makes me wish the Mongols would invade or something. I want to see that Brooklyn boy in a fight so badly. I want him to come out all bloody and sweaty and lick him clean and comfortable.

No, no, no. I don’t want Eric. Stop it, Tuesday. Stop it! It’s just that: here’s a guy who really believes in something. More importantly, here’s a guy who is more like me than Quentin is who has managed to attain some depth.

Previously, Tuesday decides to go to her ex-boyfriends house, not because she wants to see him but because she wants to hang out with his kung-fu butler_________________

“Wow, look at you!” he said when he opened the door.

Did I mention that I looked fantastic that day? I have to tell you, I did. I had on this very loose little dress that had these wavy green and white stripes running all over it. It had this thick wheat colored stitching that made X’s all around the edges of the dress and down the left side, where there was also a pretty substantial slit. I had on white boots up to my knee and this little pink scarf around my neck.

“Thank you, thank you, Eric. Can we get that shirt off of you and so I can watch you dancing around a bit. I need to think.”

Eric smiled. “I was just about to hit the gym anyway.”

“Can we go to the roof?” I asked.

Eric poked his head outside and said, “This is the first I’ve looked outside, you know? Quentin had to get ready for three weeks away and we were scrambling all morning long getting his crap together.”

“You’re not going with him?”

“He thinks I might need to put out some fires. He has his business assistant with him. I guess they are going to buy a bunch of stuff and give away a bunch of money.I think someone was kidnapped but it might have been political. It was really, really confusing. The boss was really keyed up.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Quentin keyed up.” That bastard.

“Well, it’s nice out here. Yeah, let’s go to the roof. Just let me grab the telephone.”

The reason that Quentin’s roof is so good is because it’s right on the edge of a little park. It’s just one of those tiny patch parks the city has, a square block with a statue in the middle. That’s all. Still, you can usually only see maybe the front of four or five buildings from most roofs. If you look over the front edge of Quentin’s roof, though, you can see about twenty other buildings. His is a little taller than the rest, too, so you can see a lot of the roofs of the other places, and you can watch what people do up on them. At four our five in the afternoon, Eric is not the only one who comes up to the roof to practice Kung Fu, but he’s definitely the best one in this neighborhood.

One time I pointed out a guy doing a similar workout to his on top of a place catty-wampus to us, and I said, “You could kick the shit out of that guy!”

Eric gave me a little jab on the shoulder, “That’s not what it’s about, Tuesday.”

“It isn’t?”

“You know that.”

I thought, I do?

I thought he liked kicking ass? I still don’t really get it, but Eric’s happy with himself like Grimm is and that’s what I want to be, too. I want direction. I want a personality. Eric shrugged his shirt off as soon as we got up to the roof and made me rub some sunscreen on his back before he got started. I’ve had a lot of brainy boyfriends, and brainy boyfriends never have muscles like Eric’s. A lot of them workout, so they have muscles. There’s just aren’t as edgy as Eric’s. Especially not to the touch.

Then there are all the jock boyfriends I’ve had. They have a different sort of muscles too. Actually, they usually have more fat than the brainy guys. If a jock is really ripped and thin, either he has really serious metabolism or he’s a closet queer. One or the other, and it is usually the latter.

I always ask Quentin to bring me up to the roof when I want to think. It used to be that Quentin  would come up here and hold me in his arms and just tell me everything that had happened in his whole day. It was like I was his journal and he was writing in me. He would tell me about every client, about his boss, about what it made him remember from Social Work School. He would tell me about what he had read in the papers that day and what people had asked him to come to that evening. I would nuzzle him all through it and I wouldn’t say a word.

That didn’t last long, though.

Then I learned to go up there and remember those first couple weeks when he really seemed to like me. Then I came up there to look out at the city. Then I came up there to watch Eric and look at the city. Now I come up there to watch Eric and to try to think about how that guy who watches women sleep thinks about the city. How does he pick women? How does he figure out which buildings are easy to break into?

It takes a thief, you know? That’s what Coolio says, and Coolio is my kind of motherfucker.

Previously, Tuesday goes to the home of her ex-boyfriend, Quentin, only to find his man-servant there alone. Quentin has left the country for several weeks, so all she can do is go to the roof and watch the man-servant practice his kung fu._______________________

You don’t care about this, do you? Why should you? If you were wondering, I put on some sunscreen out there, too, as the sun was strong enough to burn. I’m a pretty fair skinned girl. I hate burning. I feel like someone is turning me into a leather jacket, you know? And I hate leather jackets.

Grimm says I should think about becoming a vegetarian. She says people would ask me why I was a vegetarian and I’d get to practice having a good reason for something. Whenever I ask her what a good reason for being a vegetarian is, she says there are a lot of them. So I ask her which one I should choose and she says, “That’s the point. You need to pick yourself. The one you pick will say something about you.” I’m still not a vegetarian, though. I don’t know if it’s because I’m not ready to give up meat or if it’s because I’m not ready to pick a reason to be a vegetarian.

Eric took a mat out of this little storage shack that they had up there. He laid it out while I looked out over the park. I watched people walking by down there and asked myself which of them looked like they might be a freakish pervert. I mean, they say cities are full of pervs. I have met my share, though usually they get introduced to me as “quirky,” and Grimm says that’s because they’re rich. I’m not really rich. I’m faux-rich. I get to hang out with rich people because I know how to wheedle money out of them, and I have that rich look.

No, I am not a call girl.

God.

I had a job.

“Do you think the guy has a job?” I asked Eric. He knew that by ‘the guy’ I meant the one that goes into women’s bedrooms and watches them sleep. I guess I do talk to Eric a little. This is what I talk to him about. It’s an on-going conversation. I can just pick up where I left off whenever I want.

I heard a thunk. Then Eric said, “Yes, I do.”

“Do you think it’s full time? I mean, wouldn’t he need to be able to go out and scout women during the day? Follow them around and stuff?”

Thunk! “Maybe he works a swing shift somewhere? Maybe he’s blue collar?”

“Do we have blue collar people in the city? Wow. I thought that was only out in the country.”

Thunk! “That’s why God gave us the Labor Movement,” Eric said. “God bless ‘em.” Eric didn’t talk about unions too much, but when he did it usually had something to do with his dad and he used the old neighborhood accent a little. Very cute.

“I fell into a dumpster last night trying to figure out how he got into a building I had heard he got into.”

Thunk! I turned around. Eric was doing standing flips. He had a big red target laid out on his mat and he was practicing landing in the exact same spot as he started. Crazy. Who thinks of these exercises? When he saw I was looking at him now he spread his arms out wide and bowed. What I think I appreciated the most about Eric’s body was his six-pack. He has one hell of a tummy. Not the sort of body you would ever see on the child of a big Union Man. Eric said his dad weighed in at 275 pounds. “He could rip the head off a pitbull,” Eric said once, with a very un-Zen smile.

“The cab driver told me that the guy doesn’t exist,” I said.

“He did? How’s he know that?”

“He said that the people I run around with just lie all the time.”

“He knows your friends?”

“He was sort of know-it-all-y.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“He said that the people in the places I go to tell stories that aren’t true. He said that’s not the reason they tell stories.” I choked a little as I said it. I guess that hurt my feelings.

Eric gave me a comforting smile. Eric shaved his head, and somehow that made me feel comforted, too. Like women with big breasts. I find bald heads and big breasts soothing. I’m more likely to trust anyone with a bald head or big breasts. I have small breasts and lots of hair and I have never found it comforting to look at myself. Eric did one more flip, I think to amuse me, and then he said, “He’s just saying they talk a lot of trash. It’s not the same.”

“Really?”

“What did he say about the guy?”

“He said he’d never heard about him.”

“Weird.”

“Lots of cabbies haven’t.”

Eric nodded, and started doing his Tai Chi poses. I watched him instead of watching the city. I tried not to think. Sometimes, I can watch Eric and almost feel like I was doing the poses myself. Arm forward and foot back. Lean. Stretch neck. Return. Breathe. I listened to my breath. I listened to the air. I listened to Eric’s feet. Then I tried not to listen to anything.

I remember a few years ago, around the time that I had dropped out of college, I was sleeping with this English grad student who wanted to pillow-talk me about Transcendentalism. He said that he had studied a little bit of meditation before deciding to go to grad school. Now, I have to tell you, normally I will put up with any kind of pillow-talk. I love it. I especially liked pillow talk with smart guys, because they tell you about writers’ or scientists’ opinions on sex. It felt dirty/delicious to think about the people your teachers had rambled about to you in high school obsessing on the naughty little nugget of yummy that you just did in the middle of the night and all the sweat. You know?

When this guy started talking about meditating, though, I sort of went off. I was like, what? Meditating? Are you serious? We were fucking. Who wants to talk about doing nothing after you’ve been fucking? Who wants to talk about doing nothing ever? Those were the days that I didn’t like doing nothing in. Doing nothing felt alone. Doing nothing was just another way of talking about sleep, as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t want to talk about sleep. I had a prescription for sleep and sleep was that simple.

Now, though, I like thinking about doing nothing. I like thinking nothing. I like watching Eric and using that to focus me. It makes me feel more real. I feel right on the edge of seeing through to some sort of reason, some sort of me.

“You could come with me to a fight tonight.” Eric said.

“You’re going to go see fights?”

“Extreme fights. There are some kung fu guys.”

“I thought you said that’s not what it’s about.”

“It isn’t, but there are some trainers there I want to talk to. And it helps to watch people use it. Come with me. It won’t exactly be fun, but it will be different for you. It will give you a different crop of people to quiz.”
I nodded, but it didn’t mean I’d agreed to go. Obviously, I really needed to talk to women, and that wouldn’t really be a women’s scene. I said, “This girl I know told me she knows someone in that building where I think the guy went.”

“Really?”

“I’ve got her number. Do you think I should call her?”

“You gotta do what you gotta do.”

I nodded, but he couldn’t see me. I think Eric liked it, in a weird way, when I didn’t answer his questions. I think these Zen guys would rather have a question than an answer. Or maybe it didn’t matter so long as he had my attention? Maybe Quentin gave him bonuses for distracting me from him?

That bastard, Quentin.

Previously, Tuesday hangs out with her boyfriend’s assistant, Eric, watching him work out on the roof and seeing his zen-like advice on her quest and her psyche while watching him do backflips. _____________________________________________

I left Eric at Quentin’s place. I went outside and caught another cab and took it across town. I couldn’t (wouldn’t) talk to this cabbie because he was listening to Rush Limbaugh  and I was sure I wouldn’t like him. He was fat like Limbaugh, but messier. Well, now that I think about it. I’m sure Limbaugh would have shit all over his clothes if he didn’t have minders cleaning him up all the time.

I heard once that he’s never owned a pair of jeans, though, so maybe not. That’s why he’s a fat fuck. You’ve got to get casual to work out. I wonder if the cabbie had a hearing problem? He was listening to Rush way louder than he should have. If he had a hearing problem, then God was telling him not to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I bet his hearing would get better if he promised God that he would not listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore.

I took the cab to the home of this crazy girl I knew, a pot addict named Moon who lived in a fourth floor walk-up. She was my little secret. She claims that the guy who watches women sleep has visited her. She has the whole story. Only, when you listen to her, it’s hard to believe that she didn’t dream it, you know? That’s what Grimm said after I told her about Moon, anyway.

Moon lets me visit whenever I want. She always knows I’m going to ask her to tell the story, but she’s always high so she likes telling it. She likes everything.  I think Moon’s parents support her because they don’t know what else to do. Her parents are in Buffalo. Maybe they think if they prop her up then she won’t embarrass them by coming back home to live in their basement? That’s what my parents would have  done if I ended up like Moon.

One time, when I was at Moon’s, I thought I heard her say “this is Mona” to someone on the phone. I’m not sure. Maybe Moon isn’t really her name? Doesn’t seem like hippies in Buffalo could support a pothead, right, so her parents probably didn’t give her a name like Moon. She even offered to change her name to ‘Monday’ if I wanted, once. She thought that would be so great. I bet she had some ‘shrooms in her when she said that. She said we could go out together and people would love it.

Of course, we never went out together, and, as I contemplated the social consequences of being seen with someone like Moon, it occurred to me that the reason Rush Limbaugh never wears jeans is just so he can make absolutely sure he never ends up anything like people like Moon.

Previously, Tuesday makes her way over to see Moon. Or Mona. Or Mo. Whatever you like, really. ___________________________________

The folks that lived in the same building as Mona did not really seem to think too much about security. Its doors had never been locked any of the times I came, so that I could always just walk in and have my run of the place. Light had begun to dim a bit by the time I got there and entered the building, but most folks would still technically say we had daylight.

When I got to Moon’s door, it was wide open. I could see her head at its end of her tapestry-covered couch. Her eyes watched the television, which I couldn’t see, but as I came into the doorway and gave her a nervous little wave, she extended one arm and clicked off the television. She even scooted back on the couch so that she could elevate herself slightly more by propping her head on the armrest.

“Hello, Moon,” I said, shutting the door behind me.

Moon had on a long blue dress that looked like it shared a designer with the Glad Bag. She had gigantic hair. These endless curls that made a mound of near afro proportions. She liked to wrap a scarf in the mess, and today it was orange with silver stars. I say ‘today.’ I only saw Moon every few weeks. There is a very good chance that she did not change clothes daily. Why would she? She had a similarly bejeweled yellow scarf wrapped around some indeterminate part of her body. I could never tell how fit Moon was, but she had to be a little flabby. She could have been good curvy, easy. Maybe she was really hardcore into yoga and did it every day, though? I could see her type doing that. When I saw her, she did not move much and she got so wrapped up in her pillows and couches and tapestries that you might mistake a cushion that had gotten up under her dress for an oversized ass cheek. Right?

Moon watched me for several seconds, a shrewd look settling around her eyes. She said, “You don’t want to find that guy. You just want to figure him out.”

Moon liked to be touched, so I sat down on the couch in front of her belly and started stroking her side and her back.

“Mmmmm….” she said, “that feels goo-ooo-ood.” She also liked to sing sentences. I knew, sitting there, that I had not responded to what she said, and that I probably would not get away with it. Sure, Moon had to have the short-term memory of a goldfish by this point, but Moon had been thinking about me. She said, “I’ve been expecting you. You know? Since… Umm… I was watching MacGyver…” Her voice trailed off for a while, but she hadn’t finished yet. A little more juice ran into her body from her brain. “Why would you want to understand a thing like that?” Meaning my urban-legend guy in the Blue Hoodie.

I shrugged. I guarded my thoughts because Moon had started off with an observation about me, which puts me on the defensive every time. Grimm has been very pointed about this, which is probably why it scares me when other folks do it. My time with Grimm is not easy. She starts by asking me what our goal is. Our goal is: for me to become a person. Okay, she says, you really don’t believe in anything now, right? Of course that’s right. I don’t have an opinion about anything but how my shoulders look. Until you have some beliefs, some real ones, Grimm says, you really can’t criticize anything. You can’t decide if it’s right or wrong. My head starts to throb when she makes this point, so I concentrate really hard to follow her because I always take head throbbing as a sign that whatever is happening is important.

I don’t visit Moon to hear her opinions, though. She’s a lazy hippie, and if I know one thing I don’t like it is laziness. Sure, I may do very little good with my life, but at least I keep moving.

Previously, Tuesday shows up at the house of Tuesday, a hippie pothead who is absolutely sure that Blue Hoodie visited her. __________________________

“You-oo-oo are searching,” Moon said.

“That’s right.”

“Sear-er-er-ching-ingggg.”

I nodded.

“Makes a lot of sense, condense, recompense, cadence, ence, ence…” she said. She was really high.

“Tell me again what he was wearing,” I asked her.

“Rub my belly,” she said. I did. “He was not very tall. Very average height. I know because he was standing under my fern which hangs pretty low but Brandon could always stand under it no problem and he was 5’ 8”, or maybe 5’9”.Your creepazoid had on blue jeans. Old, light blue jeans. Blue jeans. Blue jeans. I don’t remember his shoes-oo-oo-oes but they must have been sneakers, right? Must have been/ must have been/ -een. Why would you go out stalking in anything but sneakers?”

I nodded. That gave Moon a sloppy smile. Her lips were huge. These were Jolie/Jagger huge lips. The sort that could suck golf balls through garden hoses. Huge lips stuck between two chubby cheeks. She did a lot of sucking with those lips, no question, but more on a pot pipe than boys. She’s the type to go for either, whenever.

“I remember his hoodie. He had on a blue hoodie-boodie.”

“Was it up?”

“The hood-ood-ood?”

I nodded and stroked her cheek.

“It was up!” she put her arms in the air like she had just got 50 on Skee-ball. “He looked dark and mysterious. Sort of sexy in a way, I guess. Sort of, dove, love. Sexy, mexy, texy.” I think Moon was getting nervous thinking about it. I don’t think her pot-addled emotions could deal with fear. Her sing-songiness always got nuttiest when we made it to this part. “You always ask the same things.” Her eyes bugged out a little when she said that. Was she surprised with herself that she had been a little direct?

I kissed her on the mouth because I knew she liked it. “I know, love.”

She smiled. “Rubby robby robot.” Translation: you’ve stopped rubbing my belly – keep going.

“How could you tell it was blue?”

“Moon’s moon shown through-bee-doo!”

Moonlight. I asked her if she would mind if I looked at her room, and she said she didn’t. Moon’s bedroom was off the kitchen, so I walked through there. Her kitchen stayed surprisingly clean for someone who constantly had the munchies and preferred her couch to anywhere on Earth. She was singing “Kum-By-Yah” and “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” back and forth as I went up the stairs. I could still hear her when I got into her room.

I had been in Moon’s room once before, but I hadn’t really thought about it then. She had a pretty big bedroom. Her bed was just a big futon mattress on the floor. I saw the fern she was talking about. It hung in a corner by a big book shelf that had all sorts of  CDs stacked all over them. One copy of Siddhartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Alchemist. Her bed had like nine different possible blankets or sheets, all in a jumble in various parts of the bed. I think she had a dozen pillows. Everything was different colors. What should I do? I stretched out on her bed. I took a bright yellow throw pillow with beads sewn all over it and propped my head up so that I could see where the guy must have stood. I imagined him there in his blue hoodie, watching. Brr.

Moon had her bed sort of in the middle of her room. It really wasn’t against the wall. It wasn’t near anything. It’s like she left it where it fell when she moved in.

She had some sort of insight about the place all the sudden, but she couldn’t quite say it to herself. What was it?

Moon’s room had a giant window in it. It had two panels that you could open up with a little turny-thing to let in air. It was probably eight feet by eight feet. It didn’t look out on much but city, street and sky, but I bet that window is the reason why Moon took this apartment. I bet she got all stoned and stared out this window and it felt as good to her as actually being outside.

What was it she had said? “Moon’s moon…” Right, right, right! She could see the moon out this window, I thought. No wonder she didn’t even have any curtains up on it. She would want to be able to look out at her namesake. I looked outside and it was dim enough that I could see the moon. It was waxing near a quarter at that point and it looked nice up in the sky, a clear night.

And so it sank in. Are you one step ahead of me? Don’t expect me to have any big revelations here for you. I will be the first to admit that I am not the smartest gal who’s ever had a Ph.D. in Saks 5th Avenue. I have been to Moon’s apartment time and time again and I had never given that window much thought. But of course, but of course. You’ve already got it.

He could see her from outside.

Somewhere outside he had wandered along until he saw this window, got somewhere he could look in and he saw her. He watched her sleep from outside first, and then he got inside. He watched from the outside until he couldn’t resist coming in here.

So, I looked out at the buildings you could see from Moon/Mona/Monday’s window. Only about three had roofs that someone could see in here from. Then there were a few apartments across the street that probably would have given visual access as well. Which one? Which one?

Did it matter?

I had an idea.

Chapter VI: Customer Service

Moon/Mona/Monday’s place was a good three miles from the building where I had fallen into the dumpster. Pretty far, but not so far if maybe Blue Hoodie lived somewhere in between. Or maybe he just used a subway stop as his base of operations? Maybe he lived out in the ‘burbs? Or a different part of town? Or in the hood? Maybe, baby, maybe he lived in a rough part of town?

Moon had a computer with dial-up Internet access, so I got onto Yahoo! Yellow Pages and looked at the businesses between Moon’s place and my favorite dumpster. I made a list of Rite Aid’s and CVS’s and Walgreen’s and any place else I could think of that might offer round-the-clock One Hour photo services. Are you with me? Are you with me?

People like me who believe that Blue Hoodie is out there don’t think that he takes pictures of the girls, right? But he might have. I have never heard anything about him having a camera with him when he actually appears in a girl’s room. That would be risky. I mean, you think about it, for all the stories you hear about girls waking up and seeing him, he probably stands in the room of a dozen more girls who never wake up. If he’s that cool and calm about it, this has to be a maneuver he knows really well. He’s probably in somebody’s bedroom every night, right? He has probably watched hundreds of girls (dozens, anyway) that have not woken up.

Maybe he takes pictures of women he knows he can count on not to wake up? See where I’m headed. Sure, there are the ones that wake up. Those are probably first appearances. There are probably others that never wake up, you know? Can’t imagine what this freak thinks about those girls.

He probably even has some friend who knows all about his creepy obsession. Maybe the guy thinks it’s cool. Maybe he even looks up to this motherfucker? I don’t know. Blue Hoodie probably knows some girl that could sleep through a monsoon. She’s probably the one he visits when he’s feeling unadventurous. He calls her ‘Old Reliable.’ He and his buddy drink their Pabst Blue Ribbon and he talks about the ineffable qualities of different positions he has seen Old Reliable sleeping in. His friend tries to talk him into actually jerking off in the room while Old Reliable sleeps, but Blue Hoodie swears he won’t. It’s against his moral code to actually beat his meat in the room while watching. The whole point is to store it up.

“Besides,” Blue Hoodie would say to his drinking buddy, “that’s the time that she’ll wake up, right? When I have my dick in my hand.” Can you hear the conversation in your head? I can hear it. Makes me hate men. Any man would laugh, you know? Don’t you fucking laugh.