Rabbit Rabbit #17: Halfsies

A (fictional) short story

Morning Sun (1952), Edward Hopper

The morning I awoke from peeling the rug off the floor was the same morning Willard showed up to the 7-Eleven with half of his hair dyed purple. The rug was on purpose; Willard’s hair was not.

Willard paid in cash for three 16 oz. Red Bulls and handed me my overdue W-2 form from Loki’s, the dingy dive bar on Pike and Henry where I’d spent the last ten months alongside him waiting table after table of drunken, jaded, heavily pierced queers and expats. It was the sort of place these fringies, as we liked to call them, hung out at late hours to forget that their families hated them, or pretend that their families hated them. Most of them, actually, were probably very rich, but I felt sort of sorry for them.

“They miss you,” Willard remarked, cracking open one of the tall cans and guzzling. I couldn’t tell if he meant the fringies or my ex-coworkers. His Adam’s apple hiccuped as he swallowed the Red Bull and I eyed it, silently thanking god I didn’t have one.

“Why’s your hair purple?” I asked.

“I used plant-based dye and left it in too long by accident.”

“Did you fall asleep?”

“No. I was distracted.”

I didn’t feel like asking a follow-up question since I knew his answer would frustrate me. I never understood how people let themselves be distracted from the thing they were really doing, especially something as tactile as dyeing hair.

Once, my mother told me that when she was five, my grandmother –known for her seeming inability to ever finish a book– had started a fire in her bedroom by leaving the iron facedown on one of my mother’s cotton nightgowns. She’d suddenly remembered an ad for a typing job in the classifieds section from the week prior and went straight outside to pull the local paper from the dumpster. The fire was small and undamaging, and my grandfather put it out immediately, but my mother’s favorite nightgown could not be salvaged, tinged by a big, brown burn. After that I swore off all distractions.

“It’s not so bad,” I offered as Willard fingered a brittle split end.

“I guess. Thankfully it happened before I finished my whole head.”

I wondered privately if it wouldn’t be better to have a full head of purple hair as opposed to half. A half head of purple hair drew more attention to the “by accident” part of Willard’s story than I assumed he wanted. But I didn’t tell Willard that. I didn’t want him to feel bad, like he did when we broke up seven years before. It ended up being fine because of the passing of time and our mutual discoveries that we both preferred members of our own sex, but still.

Plus he’d walked twelve blocks to meet me at the 7-Eleven below my apartment. Usually we met halfway between our apartments to exchange things like shirts and and gossip and employment forms but he needed the exercise after staying in bed for three days and it was closer to Loki’s. He had to get to work on time because Tim the bar manager was being a meanie bo beanie ever since I left and would I mind if he kept the beaded top he’d borrowed for an extra week? He had a date that weekend and wanted to impress.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound indifferent, and ambled out into the heat.

Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), Edward Hopper

Someone had been yelling at me in the dream. Big, guttural howls like an agitated homeowner might hurl at a trespasser.

It was to reach the floorboards, my peeling away the rug. The act was ferocious and consumed me fully. Aside from the fact that it was covered in wall-to-wall carpet, the room in the dream was nondescript. The rug had the sandpapery roughness of a generic welcome mat and I tore it away like William Morris wallpaper or the skin on the side of a fingernail. I later wondered if my dream self might have been looking for something, but I could not recall what. I wasn’t digging for buried treasure, nor had I lost something. Whatever my reasons, my peeling made the somebody very angry. Maybe it was their rug, or at least their floorboards. When I finally did reach the floorboards, I pressed my cheek against them to feel their cool sturdiness and inhaled their musky scent. I felt like saying something victorious, like “at last!” or the more obvious, “victory is mine!”

When I woke up, I expected my real-world rug to be gone, or at least torn up. I peered over the side of my bed to check but it was still there, unruffled. Then I got dressed to meet Willard.

It dawned on me as I exited the 7-Eleven that the other half of the avocado I’d eaten with salt and a spoon for breakfast –not out of any salubrious intent, but rather a chronically empty fridge– was still on the counter. I had left it there consciously, being too hungry to wrap it up before eating its twin and too lazy to go back and do it once I finished eating. Now it was two hours later and most certainly brown. Nothing disgusted me more than a browned avocado. I found the prospect of coming home to it entirely depressing and so resolved to stay out all day.

My computer was hot despite being closed and slapped against my hip in the tote bag. Every third step it swung between my legs and I had to remove it. 

Too annoyed to walk any further, I slipped into a minimalist espresso hut and ordered a double shot, knocking it back with force. I hate the taste of coffee. I find that its pure-dirt quality is heightened, not masked, by milk and sugar, so plain it is for me, always.

I opened my computer and a video from the night before popped up: KOCHER-LAGENBACK APPROACH TO THE ACETABULUM: STEP-BY-STEP.

I’d taken a new job editing instructional surgery videos for the orthopedic unit at a hospital uptown to be shown to residents as training. This was why I’d been able to quit my job at Loki’s. I found the job posting online, applied on a whim, and in two days was chatting with a surgeon over video call to assure him I was okay with the “sensitive” nature of the videos.

My job was to splice together the best angles of each step in an operation. I knew nothing about medicine, which the doctors said was helpful. My choices were purely aesthetic. It’s pretty easy to carve out the narrative arc of a surgery because each one begins with an incision and ends with a suture. The middle stuff is the most exciting. That’s when the surgeons really get in there. Sometimes things got gruesome, like during spinal reconstructions. I had only edited two but both times I worried the patient might not make it out alive due to the sheer amount of blood all over the table. Someone’s job was just taking all the used gauze to a biohazardous trash can.

My favorite part about editing the videos was listening to the muffled chatter from the scrub team. There was never any time for pleasantries.

Forceps.

Patient’s temperature is 98.2.

Hands off the Christmas tree.

I liked to imagine scenarios of operating room drama unfolding as the surgery went on. The technical term for an OR is an operating theatre, so this was not hard to do. I imagined that one of the circulating nurses was fucking the anaesthesiologist, and she was mad because they had to stand on opposite sides of the table. So she made sultry eyes at him to pass the time. Some of the longer surgeries can last up to fourteen hours. Fourteen hours of eye-fucking. The ultimate turn-on, one would imagine, but I added the detail for fun that the anesthesiologist had a wife at home and a baby on the way, so he never looked back at her.

A couple holding hands in line peered over my shoulder at the Kocher-Lagenback video. I didn’t see them doing the peering, but a few seconds later when I heard the thud of the man’s body hitting the tiled floor of the espresso hut, I put two and two together.

“Honey, wake up. You fainted,” the woman stated.

She didn’t sound too freaked out. I realized the man must have been one of those types of husbands who faints in the labor and delivery room while watching his kid’s birth, and then everyone laughs when the nurses give him a juice box.

He came to, and in my head I thought, “he’s coming to.” Then I got to thinking about the etymology of the phrase “come to,” and then the word “come.” I wondered as I watched the barista offer the man a glass of water if we say “come” to refer to orgasm because it is a kind of coming into being, or consciousness, or back to earth. A crash landing. Everything in smithereens.

The next thing the woman said was to me and I snapped into focus.

“He’s not good with blood. Maybe turn your brightness down or something. People don’t need to look over and watch a full-on surgery in an espresso hut.”

“I’m sorry. It’s for my job. I don’t like working at home for fear of distractions.”

Once the man regained consciousness and stood up, he ordered a turbo shot. I considered telling him that coffee is a dieuretic and may not be the best chaser to vasovagal syncope, which I learned on one of my video chats with the surgeons is the scientific name for fainting spells. Some of the residents watching my videos would fall prey to it. This was what the surgeons called “weeding out.” Before I could decide what to say, there was Willard again, making a beeline for me.

Automat (1927), Edward Hopper

“I can’t go to work,” he croaked, near tears. “I just can’t.”

“Why?”

I thought he might say, “because it will be too sad and boring without you,” but instead, he said it was because he couldn’t face them with his purple hair. This time I knew he meant the fringies. They would hate his half-a-head of purple hair.

I suggested we go shopping for clarifying shampoo, which I recalled as a remedy for damaged hair from when the water at my summer camp got too hard.

“Can we just go to your place and lie down?”

“No. Half an avocado’s in there. It’s brown and rotting and I don’t feel like dealing with it.”

“You can’t let an avocado control you.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I have your location.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

This made Willard laugh because that was something I always used to say in college. I would say it in places we could under no circumstances get out of, like an exam or a friend’s oboe recital, and I would say it in a very sexy way that made both of us wish we really could. It was not unlike the pretend drama I created between the circulating nurse and the anesthesiologist.

We walked all the way from one side of Delancey to the other, when it becomes Kenmare. I always thought it was funny that someone had one day decided that the street would change names halfway through, as if Delancey and Kenmare were siblings fighting for the title and their dad, exasperated by all the yelling, said, “Okay, you know what? We’ll go halfsies.” I decided if I had kids I would name them Delancey and Kenmare. Hopefully my future partner would avoid vasovagal syncope and spare us all the humiliation of the juice box hullabaloo.

The saleswoman at Veda Au Natural Hair and Beauty Spa took an instant liking to Willard and whisked him away to find the right clarifying shampoo. I was left to my own devices, but I couldn’t open my laptop in the middle of the store to continue editing. So I took a good look around, and it didn’t take long for me to notice something strange about the spa: it was lined wall-to-wall with luxurious carpet, and there was a repairman in the northwest corner using a pair of pliers to tear it up.

I could hear Willard and the saleswoman hooting and hollering in the back. I guessed that they had moved past clarifying shampoo as a discussion topic and were now quickly on their way to becoming buddies. Willard had that way about him. People wanted to be near him and hear what he had to say because it was usually the right balance of scathing and funny. I rolled my eyes so far to the left that I saw a standing sign that read:

PLEASE EXCUSE OUR APPEARANCE. WE ARE WORKING ON MAKING VEDA AU NATURAL EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL FOR YOU!

I found this request a little over the top because nothing about the inside of Veda Au Natural looked ugly or out of the ordinary to me other than the rug being torn up. The repairman had a protruding stomach, was balding, and the kind of sweaty that’s just a thin film of grease on a guy’s forehead. I approached him from behind.

“What’s with the floor overhaul?”

“The owners decided they were sick of hair scraps getting stuck in the carpet. It was the worst design in the world– wall-to-wall carpet for a hair and beauty spa. So I’m taking it all out and replacing it with tile.”

Just like the espresso hut. Maybe they would use the same tile supply company.

“Are they a couple? The owners?”

“What? No. They’re childhood friends.”

“Oh. That’s nice. What’s your name?”

“Ron.”

He did not ask for mine but I didn’t mind. Ron was busy doing what adults call earning a paycheck. His hands moved at a much faster pace than mine had in the dream, like Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times. Entranced, I watched him for what felt like a long, long time. He reminded me of my father despite looking nothing like him. My father was lean and clean-shaven and dapper and ate a turkey sandwich for lunch every day. I hadn’t seen him since I was fourteen.

I heard the swish of a curtain and the saleswoman entered. “We did some experimenting,” she giggled, then added, “some fooling around.” I hoped for her sake that she worked on commission selling hair products because she was an all-American flirt. She explained that she had been wanting to experiment with bleach anyways, and so she worked her magic for free on this absolute queen. I had never heard Willard referred to as an “absolute queen” before, not even by the fringies, so I looked around for a few seconds to see who she meant.

Then Willard walked out from behind the curtain pretending to be someone onstage making their grand entrance. He even did a fake bow. His hair was wet, bleach-blonde, and about seven inches shorter. The skin around my cheeks became so flushed they began to burn. My heart thumped like it does when you see photos of your best friend with a new friend that they made unrelated to you and you worry for a minute that they might have forgotten about everything you two share.

Willard looked amazing in the new hair and I didn’t want to tell him, for the opposite reason I hadn’t wanted to tell him his half-purple hair looked strange. I didn’t want him to feel good or bad. I just wanted him. Not sexually, anymore, but in the way that the French phrase for “I miss you” actually means “you are missing from me.” I wanted him in the 7-Eleven at whatever time I demanded he be there. I wanted him to tell me the vibes were off at Loki’s in a bad way ever since I left. To say “I miss you” instead of “they miss you.” I wanted him to walk around with me all day whenever I forgot to put the avocado halves away. If these things could come true, nothing would ever be missing.

Two Comedians (1965), Edward Hopper

Then a noise.

“FUCKING SHIT!”

It came from Ron, who was now in the southwest corner of the spa. We all whipped our heads around. He was standing above the torn rug peering down at something.

“Termites,” he declared. “Must be hundreds, thousands even.”

Ron was right; a bunch of tiny bugs were crawling all over the floorboards and what was left of the carpet. Some of them were headed for the back. He must have struck the bug equivalent of a goldmine. The saleswoman screamed and bolted to the phone to call the childhood best friends. She told them to get over here as soon as they could because she was freaking the hell out and didn’t feel equipped to deal with this alone. Ron looked a little hurt by her use of the word “alone.” I secretly wished we could stay to meet them. I wanted to ask what prompted their decision to line the spa floor with carpet in the first place. Sound absorption?

But the two of us booked it right out of there faster than you can say Au Natural Disaster. Willard still had the black smock cape on. He said he felt comfortable going to work now that the half purple was gone, plus the smock cape could double as an apron. We waved and danced at each other from opposite sides of the subway track until one of our trains came; I can’t remember whose came first. I made a mental note to ask him to meet me at the 7-Eleven after the weekend to get my beaded shirt back.

When I got home, the avocado was still there waiting for me, more brown than I expected and also streaked with spidery red veins. I hated when they did that. I tossed it in the trash, sat down at the kitchen table, and opened my laptop. The circulation nurse and the anesthesiologist were frozen where I had paused them. I was almost certain they were looking at each other.

“Victory is mine!” I said.

***

Recommendations: This video, these interviews, and this book review (plus all of the fodder around Lauren Oyler.)