imareen
Hauslek poses as a young girl on the internet, arranges to
meet men at designated places, and, from a distance, watches
the disappointment come upon them like shame.
Then she secretly follows them home and kills them and steals
their money. You click your wife with that mouse? she
asks one before lopping his hand off at the wrist.
Nimareen's mother still thinks she is a computer programmer,
addicted to caffeine, admittedly, but earning six figures
in Austin, Texas. Nimareen has not been in Austin for a year
and a half. Her father sends her money, and the rest she steals
from dying perverts.
The men are middle-aged, white, usually unmarried, not necessarily
never married, almost always living alone, living in small
houses or condominiums, not necessarily their only home, sometimes
it's a place away from home, places where no one is near enough
next door to hear through walls, guarded circumstances that
preserve their delicate fantasy lives against the intrusions
of neighbors, relatives, co-workers. Online, they assume boyish
names, cutesy self-effacing names, some with awkward racy
connotations, the kind of lame double entendres geeky high-school
kids favor, but with some other element included, a co-opting
of the nicknames of members of boy bands or movie hunks or
references to literary characters or money. The names are
like license plates (W84U, L84LUV), like last year's baggy
hiphop jeans on a thirty-year-old postal worker (MaceDawg),
high-school teacher (Burn2Lurn), or pharmacist (EZPillz).
They are coy, patient, tentative, chatty. Disengenuously,
they confess to small crimes of the heart, petition for forgiveness,
accelerate the brazenness of the requests, inching closer
and closer to asking JenniFur99 or Mlissa1212 to meet them
for coffee, a "heart2heart" chat, a walk in the
park. The girls are almost never older than fifteen. Any older,
and they would be too much to handle, too loud. Too old.
At first, like anyone, Nimareen was disgusted by these men,
but soon she became intrigued by how easy it seemed for law-enforcement
types to don the disguises of cutesy email addresses and pose
as young girls. How strange, and unfair, it seemed, too, that
this game played on behalf of women was played only by men.
Nimareen sensed opportunity. She became JenniFur99, Mlissa1212,
Tina4ever. She escaped into these girls, into their slang
and dread, their clothes and irony. She felt younger, but
with the fluid thrill of knowing the future, the power of
secrets. Never meet them at home. Only took one mistake to
learn that. A café was safer. Public, reserved, civilized,
voices hushed and books opened, the exhalations of steam into
milk, beans shattered in whirring blades, newspapers folding
and unfolding like prehistoric ferns. Sit in the back, wait
for the bell to ring as the door opens, the air and light
and city sounds flooding in around the silhouette of the slouching
programmer, the hopeful middle manager, the frightened camera
salesman. Every time the door opens, she feels the ring of
the bell between her shoulder blades, at the base of her skull,
a steely resonance, a singing needle. She hums, her skeleton
vibrates, nervy muscles strung across the bones of some organic
instrument, some ancient harmonious cavity. It feels right,
a visceral justice, a return to solidity and equilibrium.
Don't flinch. Turn the page of the Lifestyle section, a nonthreatening
periodical, feminine, disposable. Look up slowly, stealth
glance, a flash of furtive surveillance to establish the presence
of the red baseball hat, always the red baseball hat, she
insists on it, makes it easier to track them in a crowd, usually.
Sometimes they whip it off, slap it against their thigh as
they stride away down the sidewalk, upset, let down, taking
it out on the damn red cap they bought special, for her. They
deserve it, but she'll get caught, eventually, someday, won't
she? She should slow down at least. Sometimes she vows to
quit, as if it were a bad habit, an unhealthy indulgence.
She tries to talk herself out of it in voices belonging to
society in general, then in voices more specific, animated,
those of her father, her mother, even her younger self, then
her future self. Alone, she has trouble ignoring these sensible
voices expressing concern for Nimareen, her life and health
and well being, and sometimes she finds it impossible to stand,
to weave toward the door, to push out into the city, to spot
the red cap, to press on.
She reads a lot. She keeps up with the news. The latest horrors
nourish her resolve. The dismembered limbs of a tourist wash
up on the beach of a Jamaican resort, and the proprietors
and local journalists blame the victim for having invited,
with tight swimwear and loose morals, the criminal sexual
instincts of men. An eight-year-old girl wanders from her
backyard pool, and most of her is found a year later in seven
separate paint cans in a basement two doors down. A mother
is raped in the back of her minivan while her children listen
from their car seats.
In a café, waiting for the latest one, Nimareen kisses
vanilla steam and drinks her coffee and reads the paper and
feels her pulse in her eye. She sees its effects. The pulse
disturbs her focus. Her focus is going in and out due to the
expansion and contraction of the vessels filling and emptying
of blood.
She has vision tremors.
The stick of her heart beats the drum of her eye.
The door opens, the bell rings, he touches, shyly, the brim
of his red cap, and Nimareen can't believe no one else hears
this. Her body, it's so loud. The music her body makes, it
bounces off walls, it fills the space, it sings, blaring,
roasting the air, it carries her, lifts her, an aria of justice,
a howl of vengeance, moving her up and out and after him,
and no one else hears this, no one feels it. Impossible. Impossible.
The music her body makes. She can't hear anything else.
[END]
© David Barringer 2002
